Veronique enters the school building, walking with her chimes, as if she needed another reminder of her angelic quality. When she gets to the music room, she sees a middle aged man setting up what appears to be theatrical equipment, including some lights. She apologizes and tells him that she has a class in that room. He shrugs and says he wasn’t told that. She apologizes again and walks off with the chimes. Why she is apologizing to him in this situation, I do not know.

She then runs into what I assume is another teacher who is hitting on her very aggressively, throwing every compliment possible on hand her way — she looks beautiful, smells nice, he like the sound of her chimes. From what he is saying, I thought at first that this was the same man we saw with her in bed, but it clearly isn’t. She doesn’t seem interested in him at all. He asks if she slept well the night before. Are we to assume that she hooked up with him as well? He also asks if he can walk her home, then says that they’re getting off early that day because of a marionette performance. Veronique seems to put two and two together in her mind and now understands what the man was doing in her classroom.

Now we get to the performance. It’s very interesting that there’s a sea of school aged children in this audience with Veronique right in the middle of them, as if she’s the only adult allowed among them, perhaps for her child like qualities.

It’s a very odd puppet show to be putting on for children. It appears to be about a beautiful ballerina who dies in the middle of a dance, leading to an older woman putting a sheet on top of her … then the sheet transforms into a cocoon. leading the ballerina to be reborn with wings, presumably as an angel. Veronique has to comfort a young girl halfway through as the ballerina dies and, yes, the whole story seems to be a metaphor for Weronika/Veronique.

But what’s interesting about the scene is Veronique’s attention, because during the performance, she notices the puppeteer creating the performance from a side view. Once she catches a glimpse of him, she cannot return her attention to the stage, she is enraptured.

What I take from her gaze is that she senses the puppeteer has a unique understanding of the life she is living, but that she does not understand. He intuits a plan that she can only interpret through ache. When he finally meets eyes with her, the puppeteer seems disturbed to notice Veronique staring. But we will soon discover than he not only welcomes her interpretation of him being all-knowing, he runs with it.