We next see Veronique in her classroom, where she has put on the blackboard notations for a piece of music she says that she enjoys. Veronique says it was only recently “discovered” but was composed over 200 years ago by a Dutch composer. It is, of course, the piece by Van den Budenmayer, the theme of the film.

As the children start to play it — and we hear most prominently the violins — Veronique walks over to the window of the classroom and sees the puppeteer putting his equipment back in his van, which has a painting of an angel outside of it.

This would probably be a good time for me to show my hand and reveal my theory of the film. Kieslowski repeatedly creates these angelic young adult women in his movies and he shows numerous ways of admiring them. There is almost always more than one older man in her life, one who serves as the loving father figure, the other who serves as her animus/god, the wise person who seems to understand her like no one else, as if she is his creation. The puppeteer is clearly Veronique’s animus figure in the film, but he is also the Kieslowski stand in.

It’s important to know this because Kieslowski, while admiring everything about his angelic creations, does not want to sexually possess these characters, he wants to be them. (Which is also a potential interpretation of Dekalog 4 — one I will need to keep in mind.) He created his own anima, repeatedly, in the form of pure beauty, but not quite innocence. Kieslowski’s heroines are always sex-comfortable and sex-positive.

It will be important to keep this understanding in mind as we watch the puppeteer slowly lure Veronique into his life. Veronique then walks through a park in a shot reminiscent of Weronika’s first heart attack. She leans up against a tree and, with tears in her eyes, begins to breathe heavily. She is blessed with a powerful intuition. It first warned her to stop performing music, because of the fate it created for her other half, and now it is telling her to pay attention to her health.

So the next shot is in a medical center, where apparently Veronique has gone to a cardiologist to have her heart checked out. We don’t see the doctor or any details of the event, although I can imagine how strange a doctor would find it for a woman in her 20s to suddenly show up, asking for cardiac tests. One of my sons, who just turned 18, has spent much of the summer convinced that his musculo-skeletal pain is cardiac, which has led to numerous doctor visits and a completely pointless visit to a cardiologist. Believe me, these doctors have very little interest in seeing anxious young people in their offices.

Then again, I don’t know the French health care system, maybe they are more accepting of highly defensive medicine. As Veronique leaves the facility, we see her dragging her scarf on the ground … the threads of the maroon scarf trailing prominently on the white floor. Just like with Weronika, threads, strings, are a repeating motif for Veronique. She apparently was given a clean bill of health from the doctor, because as Veronique pulls her car into a red light stop, she pulls out a cigarette to light. Except she, deep in thought as always, is paying no attention and tries to light the cigarette from the wrong end.

Then she hears a car horn and looks to her left. She had pulled up right beside the puppeteer without realizing it. He points to her cigarette and gestures for her to turn it over. Veronique takes his direction and smiles warmly. He smiles, nods and drives off … Veronique has longing in her eyes as she watches him pull away.

She is next asleep in her bed, bathed in greens and golds. Awoken by a very obnoxious sounding telephone ring, she picks up and hears nothing but breathing on the other end. She says that she’s going to hang up, but a male voice replies “no.” We then get one of those classic Kieslowski interruptions that feel like a hallucination. It first features Weronika’s vocal performance the moments before her death, abruptly cutting off as she falls. The visuals for this auditory moment are a deep crimson screen, with a small visual bubble on the far right where the face of Weronika appears, then fades away. As soon as Weronika’s vocals fade, the film’s theme begins to play on a harp.

Veronique then intervenes, asking the caller to please hang up first, she was sleeping and wants to go back to bed. He obliges and the soundtrack switches to the sound of a disconnected line.

I feel for what Veronique is going through. She is receiving messages that feel divinely inspired, motifs of angels surround her. It’s like she’s being visited by the kind of daimonion that Socrates spoke of, one who warns her of danger ahead. Yet she does not know where the divine ends and real life begins. Is this man, the puppeteer in the angel van, who has likely just made a harassing phone call, part of her destiny? You can’t blame her for believing it to be true, not with all of the other strange events surrounding her.