Scoop/The Double Life of Veronique

by Lons

 
SCOOP
 
It's sadly appropriate that Woody Allen's latest comedy concerns ghosts. In Scoop, the writer/director has become a ghost of his former self. Many of the signposts of Woody's classic films pop up in this forgettable, joke-free comedy, but they're like dim apparitions, present in a twisted version of themselves for a brief moment before fluttering away into the ether.

I know he's prolific by nature, but it seems strange that Allen would bother to make a film each year unless inspired by some great new idea or passionate artistic urge. Scoop evidences neither. It feels like penance, like Allen giving himself over to the immediate task of throwing a film together even though he, personally, could care less whether or not it's capable of actually providing any laughter or entertainment value. Could filmmaking have, at this point in his long and storied career, become a compulsion for Woody? Is he incapable of taking a break and recharging, giving himself time, perhaps, to discover a new source of inspiration?

(Yeah, I know he's getting kind of old, but if this is the best he can turn out, better to just retire now...I say all this as a huge fan. But I think that even a short break between projects might help the guy come up with something more enjoyable than this blandifesto.)
 
Even Allen's performance betrays his lack of enthusiasm for the enterprise. In his first scene with co-star Scarlett Johansson, Allen looks down at the floor the entire time and flubs a few of his lines. Could that have possibly been the best take? Or was it the only usable one?

It's particularly disheartening to see such a pinched, awkward effort come right on the heels of Allen's best film in over a decade, Match Point (which also starred Scarlett Johansson, in a role better suited to her abilities). This new film shares much more in common with Allen's career-low, pre- Melinda and Melinda period that included such grim death marches as Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending and his unwatchable nadir, Anything Else.

As in most of those films, Allen starts with a big, goofy 1930's-style comic premise. Sandra (Johansson), a plucky young journalism student vacationing in London, meets the ghost of a dead reporter (Ian McShane) during a magic show, who tells her the identity of the infamous Tarot Card Killer. With the help of the jittery, over-the-hill magician who first conjured the spirit (Allen), she must gather evidence against her suspect, wealthy heir Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman). That is, unless she falls in love with him first.

It's extremely broad and kind of silly, but I see no reason why this premise could not have been turned into a servicable comedy. (Is not one of his career highlights, Sleeper, broad and silly?) But Allen stumbles at literally every step. Most fatally, he hasn't designed one single funny character. Not one.

Johansson and Jackman have zero chemistry (surprising when you consider that they played lovers in another film this year, The Prestige). In this case, it's because their characters are total duds with almost no personality. They're not interesting apart, so why would they make an interesting couple?

Sandra resembles a character Woody might have written for himself years ago; she's urbane, pessimistic and cynical yet somehow still enthusiastic about life. But rather than go over the top like Allen or one of his better stand-ins, Johansson underplays all of the hysterics, the theoretically "funny" moments. So they fall totally flat. Allen has cast her because of her physical attributes, getting her into her underwear or swimsuits whenever possible, but perhaps didn't pause to consider her ability with physical comedy.

Jackman fares even worse. He's saddled with a dilemma from the beginning - he must be likable and charming yet also a potential serial murderer - which he solves by making Peter a complete blank. Sandra seems to like him, but we sense it must be just because he's attractive and rich and has a nice collection of antique musical instruments. He fails to express a single interesting or original thought in 90 minutes. He's got kind of a Prince Charming complex, like a guy who has sat in a room for 30 years doing nothing but practicing his genteel romantic patter in case a young, beautiful woman ever comes by for him to respectfully woo.

For a guy who's used to working with large, talented ensembles, Allen hasn't given himself many funny co-stars with whom to play around. Johansson, though she's been overexposed and on a bad streak lately, can be good in films, but she's not all that funny. Jackman's not funny. The only other major character is undead reporter Joe Strombel, played by the delightful British actor Ian McShane.

McShane has kicked ass in movies and TV for 30 years (he's best known to Americans as the moustache-twirling wildman Al Swearengen on HBO's stellar "Deadwood"), but his character exists purely for the purposes of exposition. Allen needs Sandra to hear about Peter Lyman somehow, and the idea of her hearing it from a ghost is funny. But the ghost himself doesn't get to be funny.

So Joe shows up and explains the in brief little bursts and then disappears on cue. How did he get back to Earth from the afterlife? Where's he going when he vanishes? What does he care about getting a good story if he's dead and won't get any credit? At one point, he interjects randomly into a conversation that he's going to go away forever, and then he does and we never hear from him again. Even Poochie went out with more fanfare.

Joe's story opens the film in excellent, classic Woody Allen fashion, on the boat across the River Styx, escorted by the Grim Reaper. He has died of a heart attack but seems kind of nonplussed about the whole thing. He starts talking to a recently deceased woman, who tells him that she discovered the identity of the Tarot Card Killer and was then poisoned. What a scoop! If only Joe could somehow get this information to a live reporter, he'd be the first one in the world with the story!

At this point, I thought the film was going to be great. What's more Woody Allen-esque than opening a screwball comedy with a serial killer, a funeral and a boat trip through the Land of the Dead? I soon realized that this would be the only inspired sequence in the whole film. Counter-intuitively, despite his familiarity with death-focused comedy, Allen can't even muster any good one-liners for his ghosts.

A feeling of weary laziness just hangs over the proceedings from this point on. Sometimes, Allen sets himself up for a joke and then doesn't even take a swing. In one scene, his blue collar Brooklynite is led into a massive, opulent English garden, a slow underhand pitch to any Marx Brothers fan, let alone Woody Allen, and all he says is, "Wow, this is amazing." Wow, this is amazing? YOU'RE WOODY ALLEN! WHERE'S THE PUNCHLINE?

The Depression-era spirit of Scoop ought to bring out Allen's sharpest comic instincts. Those are the films that inspired him as a young person to write comedy. And it's not just the Preston Sturges reference points (mistaken identities, poor people sneaking into high society, last minute reversals) that suit Allen's sensibilities. He works in some classic vaudeville jokes into the magic routines. It's a wacky romantic comedy with an attractive female lead! It's not like this isn't familiar ground. Woody once was capable of writing really lively, intriguing female characters - women who weren't just refractions of his own nebbishy personality. Sandra's a pair of empty glasses.

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE
 
Each shot, each image, of Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1991 masterpiece The Double Life of Veronique has some deeper significance. His films are so dense with symbols, motifs and subtle threads, you sense this must reflect the way the man actually saw the world - not a random, senseless collision of moving parts, but an elegant and synchronous universe of interconnectivity. In everyday life, we're unable to detect the hand of fate shuttling us all around, so Kieslowski attempts to slow time down in his films, to demonstrate how "coincidence" is really just a convenient euphamism for fate.

Veronique opens with an inverted image. As a young girl, the main character(s) look(s) on a city from upside-down. We see a reverse cityscape, dimly-lit buildings floating above a blue night sky. The film to follow presents an equally capsized perspective, only metaphysical instead of geographical. Everything is recognizable - the people with their jobs and their commutes and their private hopes and dreams, the bustling streets of post-Cold War Paris and Warsaw playing themselves - just as a night sky is still recognizable upside-down. The ingredients are all present but their sense, their order, has been violated.

Kieslowski uses this set-up to provoke. Is the identity crisis at the center of Veronique truly impossible? How could you prove or disprove an unspoken emotional and spiritual bond between strangers? (You couldn't, because the moment the two became aware of one another's existence, they would cease to be strangers.)

Kieslowski presents us with a barrage of surreal-yet-theoretically-possible circumstances, strange events that we all know can and do actually occur, from unlikely coincidences to low-grade extra-sensory perception to the uncanny realism of a well-executed puppet show. He then challenges us with the far-reaching implications. If one logic-defying event is possible, couldn't all of our ideas about what is "reasonable" and what is "irrational" be wrong?

The purposefully vague final sequence in the European cut of the film shows Veronique driving up to a tree while her father works in a woodshop nearby. She moves down her window and touches the tree and her father looks up from his project at the same moment. His tools and equipment are loud so he couldn't have heard his daughter outside, yet he sensed her presence. These sorts of peculiarities do exist, even if we don't fully understand the how's and the why's. So if it's possible for a father to sense his daughter nearby, couldn't two people in different nations who have never met still be somehow connected in a way that defies human understanding?

 
Gorgeous French actress Irene Jacob opens the film as Weronika, an adventurous and child-like Polish girl auditioning for a position singing in a prestigious Warsaw company. Much of Weronika's brief story focuses on her sensory experience of the world. She delights in holding and bouncing a small rubber ball and in pressing her forehead against a glass window on a chilly day. When her chronic heart troubles act up, she lashes about in a public park, knocking leaves off of benches and short walls. When her life comes to an abrupt halt during a virtuoso choral performance, we feel the thud of her head knocking against the wooden floorboards. Whenever possible, Kieslowski gives the audience insight into Weronika's tactile experience, whether it's dust blowing in her face or the warmth of a glint of sunlight creeping around half-closed blinds.

When Weronika dies, Veronique, a music teacher and singer living hundreds of miles away, gets a strange feeling of loneliness and isolation. It's as if someone close to her had died. Does Kieslowski want to emphasize Weronika's perceptions so that he can then show them transferred into Veronique? Or perhaps he's demonstrating that Weronika is a real person, not a dream or creation of Veronique, but a genuine doppelganger whose fleshy existence offers a challenge to our logic. These two girls never met (though they once came close) and know nothing of one another, yet they are somehow sharing a union of not only soul but body.

Over the next few scenes, Kieslowski will reveal literally dozens of connections between these two women (both, naturally, played by Jacob). They both lost their mothers at an early age. They both suffer from heart disease. They were born of the same day. They have great musical ability. (One of the most significant connections between the two women is the piece of music Weronika sings on the night of her death. Veronqiue begins teaching it to her pupils soon after.)

But beyond these superficial coincidences, and the fact that specific objects owned by one girl occasionally pass to the other, Weronika and Veronique are tied together by something more. Obviously, they are discussed in tandem because Kieslowski has chosen to make a film about them. But more importantly, the women seem to share inner lives. They both have boyfriends but seek out something more fulfilling than the men in their lives can provide. Specific actions occur to both of them, like watching an old woman cross the street or fidgeting with a ring.

Again, Kieslowski offers something of a rhetorical challenge. It's arguable that there's nothing terrifically unique about Weronika and Veronique. You could probably scrutinize dozens of women throughout Poland and France and find some of the same age who look alike and have similar aspirations, backgrounds and personalities, even names with the same root or origin. Factor in the science of psychology and our understanding of things like archetypes and we begin to understand how much "strangers" can have in common. (Of course, cinema itself is predicated upon common, shared reactions. Filmmakers can reliably make us excited or scared or sad because we all occupy similar emotional planes.) So if we can agree that strangers would have so much in common, why is it so outrageous to make the leap that these connections are more than simplistic and coincidental?

The two girls are not identical. Weronika is more outgoing and bubbly than Veronique, while Veronique seems to have more money and is generally more urban and sophisticated. Impressively, Jacob turns in two unique and individual performances even though she's playing two identical women. Without altering her physical appearance at all, she accurately conveys the shift between Weronika and Veronique. Each woman has a love scene and the differences in body language are immediately noticeable, with Weronika's playfulness directly opposing the colder and more reserved Veronique's.

Kieslowski highlights this notion throughout the film, using backwards and upside-down imagery as well as lots of shots with mirrors and reflective glass. Weronika and Veronique are not the same person, but two people having similar experiences. (An intriguing quesiton is whether Veronique would have suffered the same fate as her twin had she not given up singing.) It's a testament to Kieslowski's originality and inclusive nature. He didn't make a typical psychological thriller about divisions within the mind of the main character and he didn't make a romantic thriller about conflicts within an interpersonal relationship. This is not the story that happens to one or two people. In filming a thriller about individuals who never meet, Kieslowski encompasses not a few individual and idiosyncratic characters but the sum total of humanity.

There's far too much going on in this film to discuss in a blog entry. Long-form papers could (and, I'm sure, have) been written on the subject. At this point, I've seen most of Kieslowski's films and this remains one of my absolute favorites, something of a distillation of some of the guy's more prominant themes and ideas. Though not as overwhelming as experience as the Decalogue or the Three Colors trilogy (though it's close), this may be the best entryway into the guy's sensual and mysterious artistry.