The Double Life of Veronique, the 1991 film by renowned Polish filmmaker Krzysztof (pronounced “Christoph”) Kiéslowski, is not so much an enigma as a dramatic celebration of the unknown: a wonderfully intriguing and poetic collection of images representing, to the fullest extent, the spiritual gifts of sound and vision.

With Double Life, Kiéslowski has not reinvented film, but rather, offered a superlative example of the medium’s admirable elasticity. The film champions images, colors, and, ultimately, the ambiguities of everyday life over character and plot.

The first 25 minutes of Double Life center on Veronika (played by Irene Jacob), a Polish woman living in Kraków, Poland. While the film reveals few details of Veronika’s life, her attributes — a haunting singing voice, a cultured disposition, and a miraculous, almost celestial beauty — are celebrated in every frame, as the film follows Veronika’s vocal auditions for a symphony conductor to perform at an upcoming concert.

Veronika gets the part, but, immediately after, as she walks across the Main Market Square of Kraków, Kiéslowski offers a pivotal scene. With the faint yellow of a sunset coating her figure, Veronika comes upon a tour bus. Among the last people to board the bus is a woman frantically taking photographs of the Market — a woman who appears to be an exact copy, or double, of Veronika.

Who is this woman? What is she doing here?

We are as perplexed as Veronika, her deep, dark eyes fixated on the tour bus in a potent mixture of confusion and dreamy pleasure. But that is all, really, that we get from Veronika. Shortly after, as she sings at the concert (the remarkable score of Zbigniew Preisner soaring before a full house), she collapses and dies of a heart problem alluded to in an earlier scene.

Veronika says early in the film, “I feel that I’m not alone in the world.” After her death (which culminates in a spectacularly-shot funeral sequence where the camera, looking up from the hole in which Veronika’s grave sits, stays stationery as dirt is piled on the lens), Kiéslowski produces another incredible shot that answers Veronika’s musings. This shot, mimicking the dream-like, disorienting view of looking through a glass, watches as Veronika’s aforementioned “double” — whom we soon learn is named Veronique and also played by Jacob — engages in slow, sensual, passionate sex. Afterward, Veronique lies in bed, feeling as though a part of her has been lost. The next day, she visits her vocal coach and quits, for reasons she cannot define.

As vague and free floating as the Veronika story can be, it seems utterly straightforward compared to Veronique’s story, which fills the remaining 70 minutes of the film. While we also learn information about Veronique at a sporadic rate (she lives in the French city of Clermond-Ferrand, is indeed French, and teaches music at the grade school level), her story introduces the pivotal character of Alexandre Fabbri, a children’s book author and puppeteer who drops subtle hints that he may very well know the truth about the seemingly double life of Veronique. Kiéslowski follows the interactions of these two characters up to the film’s final shot, one of wonder, intrigue, and definitive sadness.

Interpretations of The Double Life of Veronique cover a wide range of topics. Is Kiéslowski commenting on the nature of the human spirit, and how, despite our greatest efforts for non-conformity and individuality, we really are all pieces of a grand, supernatural puzzle, all serving our part?

Or, is Kiéslowski making a determinist argument, presenting a world in which all events, no matter how small or inconsequential, are determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences?

Or maybe Kiéslowski is musing about religion and free will, where Veronika and Veronique are engaged in a parable overseen by Fabbri who, as the puppeteer, controls the actions and motivations of his gorgeous subjects?

Or, is Kiéslowski’s motivation political, where Veronika, of Poland, sacrifices her life for the future of Veronique, of France, much like Poland was sacrificed during World War II and its subsequent Soviet Union membership for Western Europe’s prosperity?

Contemplating Kiéslowski’s intentions with The Double Life of Veronique is equal parts frustrating and thrilling, an exercise of rhetorical analysis for only the most patient of viewers. That is, of course, if such analysis affects the impact of the film. Hint: it doesn’t.

To succeed as a work of art, Double Life does not necessarily need to be explained, as all the various components of the film demonstrate breathtaking ambition and vision. Much like the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot — works that confound understanding while offering images and language of ferocious beauty — Kiéslowski works on a visceral level, producing an art form that succeeds because of its visual virtuosity, not its narrative coherence. Kiéslowski creates broad canvases of stunning color palettes and sets of understated beauty with cinematographer Sławomir Idziak . Preisner’s musical score swells, creating majesty and tension in even the simplest of circumstances.

And Jacob stands front and center before it all, serving as the nucleus of the film before Kiéslowski’s adoring camera; indeed, the film could not succeed without her, as Jacob balances mystery, wonderment, and frustration (sometimes all in the same scene) in a superb performance that won her the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. In a film of such loose construction, there must be one concrete element present to sustain its vision, and Jacob certainly provides this.

And then, these pieces coalesce into images, mesmerizing images of beauty and splendor that defy explanation, demonstrating a Terrence Malick-esque sense of the vital, organic nuances of everyday life. One example is the image of Veronika, after receiving the solo in the concert; she is standing in a hallway wearing a black coat and red turtleneck. The green paint on the walls is cracked and worn, and faded yellow color is streaming in through the windows and comforting her light, brunette hair. Her long, white neck is stretched, and her head is bent back in rapture.

Or the shot of a table, simple and unadorned, but on the surface stands a glass of tea, blood red in color, with the teabag inside the glass, spinning as if suspended on an axis — and the camera sits, steady, allowing the red of the tea, the black of the bag, the deep brown of the mahogany to mesh.

Or the image of Veronique looking through a stained glass door of red and green and white, her face swaying side-to-side as the colors, powered by sunlight, beam on her silent, beautiful face.

In an interview from a few years ago, British director Peter Greenaway harped on the overrated nature of American director Martin Scorsese: “However we may admire somebody like Scorsese as a grand old man of American cinema, he still makes the same films as Griffith.”

Greenaway’s point was that Scorsese, despite the many accolades and (arguably misplaced) superlatives bestowed upon him by American critics and viewers, the films Scorsese directs do little to advance the art of filmmaking, and in the end, his films do not differ in the slightest from that of D.W. Griffith, whose Birth of a Nation was made in 1915.

While one could certainly criticize The Double Life of Veronique for its narrative ambiguity and perplexing mystery, to do so would miss Kiéslowski’s (and, implicitly, Greenaway’s) most elegant point: that behind wonder, behind the unknown, lies a spectacular vision that is exciting specifically because we do not hold all the answers. This ambiguity, in all its uncompromising boldness, represents what should be the future of film.