I mentioned yesterday the main difference between Weronika and Veronique, that of awareness. Veronique lives in a higher level of consciousness because she is attuned to the world and receptive to lessons.

The most important thing I have taken away from my years’ long study of Michel de Montaigne, supplemented a bit by what I know about Taoism, is the value of experience in life. We should not view life’s disappointments and challenges as frustrations, but rather as lessons that life is trying to teach us that we stubbornly resist. Coming to this conclusion has, for one, helped me reframe the meaning and value of my dreams, which are often filled with desires just out of reach. But I’ll leave that for a future discussion. \

To be attuned to life is to accept a great risk — our environments are filled with both signal and noise. How can we learn to properly filter? Kieslowski consistently argues in his films that we cannot. To be open to all of life’s greatest joys, we must also be vulnerable to misinterpretations and doubt. We cannot select when the world speaks to us, we need to keep our eyes and ears open and consider it all as necessary, even when it’s painful and even when revelations make it impossible to go back to the way our lives were before.

Veronique is learning about receptivity. She arrives home into an apartment building that is such a simultaneous collection of squalor and beauty that it is quintessentially Parisian and cinematic. She opens her mailbox to discover a letter than contains nothing but a shoelace. She examines the shoelace, shakes her head and crumples it up with the envelope. Inside the apartment, which seems impossibly spacious and well-appointed for something in Paris, Veronique is taking a nap (it’s funny just how often this character sleeps, not something you see in films often, but it highlights her dreaminess.) She is awoken by a golden reflection on her face, some sunlight reflected by a mirror onto her face.

She goes to the window, which looks out on a courtyard, and sees in another apartment that a boy is playing with a mirror, which makes her smile. She has apparently discovered the source of the reflection. The boy then closes the shudders of the window. But as she is still looking out the window, she notices another shimmering light, this one lands on a portfolio, more specifically on a string that hangs from the portfolio. Veronique looks out the window, trying to find the source of the shimmer, but cannot. She then goes to the portfolio and touches the string. This leads her to go out to the garbage bin, where she roots through trash to find the string and letter than she had thrown out.

She returns to her apartment and washes the string off. She then dries it with a hair drier. Veronique sits at her desk in her apartment staring at and contemplating the string. She lays it down on the desk next to a printout of her electrocardiogram. We note the wavy lines in the EKG, evidence of a beating heart and her continuing life. Veronique stretches out the string next to it — symbolizing a straight line, or in the case of a heartbeat, death.

We then see Veronique back in the apartment of the friend, the one for whom she agreed to commit perjury. They are having coffee. Apparently, this woman is another teacher at her school, because Veronique is asking her about the puppeteer. The woman says she didn’t remember much about him, Veronique asks if she remembered his name. She responds that his name was on his van — which makes it funny that Veronique didn’t see or recall it because she had three encounters with the van. Her colleague said the story of the puppet show seemed familiar, as if he had stolen it from a children’s story she read her daughter.

When the mother goes up to her daughter’s room she, of course, sees the book immediately under her daughter’s pillow. She brings it downstairs and declares that he didn’t steal the story at all, he wrote it. She says that he also wrote a lovely story “about a shoelace.” His name is Alexandre Fabbri. And while her daughter apparently loves the story, it didn’t keep her from darking out the teeth on the author’s picture on the back cover of the book. She closes the scene by saying that she’s sorry for getting her involved in her controversy and tells Veronique that someone told her husband about it.

By the way, this makes me wonder if the other friend in the previous scene, the one who refused to participate in the perjury, really might have been having an affair with him — who else could know about the plot?

Veronique then rushes off to a book store. It seems to be in the middle of the night, so the store is closed and there’s no street traffic. She browses the window and discovers, of course, that an entire display of his books are featured in the front of the store. Oh, if only life and literary marketing were so simple! At this point, Veronique cannot help but feel a tug of destiny in her life. She’s being magnetically drawn towards this man, who she had fallen for even before the grand mystery and strings started to appear.