The transition from Weronika to Veronique is stark and abrupt. The casket is in the earth, the screen fades to black, but we still hear the shovels at work covering the casket fully. As the sound continues, visuals of Veronique begin. She is bathed in that gold tinted light again, nude, some young man’s limbs caressing her.

Irene Jacob’s naked body is a work of art and Kieslowski is making the most of displaying her in the transition. Slavoj Zizek has expressed annoyance at how freely Kieslowski shows Jacob naked, annoyance he said was compounded when Polish director (and sometimes Kieslowski collaborator) Agnieszka Holland told Zizek that Kieslowski cheated on his wife with all of his late career co-stars, including Jacob. Apparently this was in a private conversation because Holland has never shared this gossip elsewhere publicly.

For Kieslowski to get the most of Jacob’s skin, he has to make the sex look, well, something not at all like real sex and, in my estimation, not something that’s likely to be terribly enjoyable. There’s no physicality in it. Veronique is lying on her side and while, yes, I know there are ways to make a position like this work, what’s on screen is definitely a workable option. The film is showing us, instead, a full-on skin worship, with some fake sex sounds laid on top to make it seem erotic.

Kieslowski both wants to show Jacob in a sexual situation, but perhaps feels uneasy displaying sex, something he could not do in his communist era Polish productions. His divided desire is obvious. But in a sense it works because the point of the scene is that Jacob is not all there. When we finally get a good look at the young man she’s with, he seems highly unremarkable in contrast to her. This is another typical Kieslowski trope — he likes to make the point that the age appropriate men who fall in love with his heroines are not worthy and incapable of understanding them.

Anyway, it’s immediately apparent that this is a transient sexual encounter. They don’t speak much to each other, but from it we can tell that they had hooked up before, most recently after graduation. When the young man asks if he can stick around afterwards, Veronique shakes her head no.

But before getting to that point, the young man asks why Veronique seems so sad. She admits that she is, but doesn’t know why and feels like she’s grieving.

We next see Veronique driving through Paris. She reaches the door of an elderly gentleman who clearly looks overjoyed to see her. He notes that it is not her appointed time — he provides some kind of musical lesson to her, but we’re not told what that is. Veronique tells him that she is there to quit, to announce that she won’t be taking any more lessons. He is extremely disappointed and declares that it’s a crime for her to stop, that she should be arrested for stopping the classes. When she doesn’t respond to this, he gets to the real thing bothering him: he asks if he’ll ever see her again. It’s clear that she won’t.

We then cut to Veronique carrying a set of chimes in a box onto a schoolyard. We will soon see that she’s a school music teacher. So the connection to Weronika is interesting and clearly quite potent — she was able to intuit from her grief that she needed to stop performing music right away, that there might be something dangerous about it. And she also had some notion that she needed to break out all existing relationships with men and prepare herself for something new.

Veronique is withdrawing in these scenes, but only because she is getting ready to welcome someone new into her life, someone Weronika’s death somehow makes necessary.