Got all up in the artsiness last night and watched Kieslowski's La Double Vie de Véronique. Rewatched rather, altho since I hadn't seen it in almost 15 years I found that my memories of it were vague and in some cases just flat wrong. I'd completely misremembered what happens to Veronika. If you're familiar at all with Kieslowski, you'll know what to expect from Véronique -- that you won't really know what's going on much of the time. And that's okay. Like Trois Couleurs he's looking at the connections between people, but not really trying to explain them. Someone (I think in one of the IMDB threads) asked "are they twins?" Which on the one hand, since both Veronika and Véronique are played by Irene Jacob (who is outstanding, as ever), doesn't seem like a bad question. But on the other hand, yes it's a bad bad question which indicates that the person asking did not understand the movie on some very basic levels. It's flatfooted, prosaic and very very American in the most negative stereotypical sort of way. And I say that as someone who, while watching the movie last night, found myself thinking, in response to several lines of dialogue: oh stop being so goddamn French!
Here's what IMDB had to say. And here's Roger Ebert
And while we're talking movies, here's the trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Right now all I have to say is: w00t!