The two films I chose were ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ and ‘Mean Girls’. These two movies are about identity love and human intuition. While these films have many differences, they also have many comparisons. They share a theme of identity crisis. These films both use the internal battle with oneself in order to make a plot thicken and make the audience think. The battles the characters face are societal issues and self-identity dilemma.
In ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ there were two women who both had a passion for music who lived in two different places, Paris and Poland. These women may have lived in separate places but when Weronika died it made Veronique feel a sense of grief and absence in life. After Weronika’s death, Veronique took her students to a musical performance and it played the song by Van den Budenmayer that Weronika performed the night she died. Later that night Veronique is woken up by a phone call with no one speaking, but she hears a choir singing the music of Van den Budenmayer in the background. The following day, Veronique drives to her dad’s house where she reveals that recently she felt she was alone and that someone was gone from her life. Even though Weronika was dead she still lived on in the subconscious of Veronique. The directors focus of duplicity was subjective because it was where two identities become one and benefit both personalities.
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In ‘Mean Girls’, Cady the new girl came to high school looking to fit in after being home-schooled in Africa. She becomes friends with two socially stranded individuals, Janice and Damian. Cady then decides to join the most infamous and popular group in school, the ‘Plastics’ to try to sabotage the leader of the group. In that process of invading the group Cady becomes a ‘plastic’. Cady’s relationship begins to fall apart between both groups. She starts to realize the horrible person she has become in order to fit in at school. She no longer wants to be socially accepted. She wanted to find her old self again but a more mature version.
The similarities between the movies are that both Weronika and Cady faced were that they would drop anyone in order to get to their goal, whether it is performing or social acceptance. The similar qualities of these two characters are the Achilles heel in the plot because the need to perform and the need to be accepted kills them socially and physically. ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ and ‘Mean Girls’ both show the difference between emotion and logic, reality and fantasy.
There are many differences between ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ and ‘Mean Girls’. In ‘Mean Girls’ Cady felt a need to be accepted by the students in her high school. She wanted to fit into the societal norms and climb up the social ladder created by the high school population. This led to her to become someone she was not and to lose the friends she had made while being in school. In ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ the main character Veronique felt that she had an emotional and mysterious connection with the unknown. The differences in the two were complementary, while Weronika would leave to chase her dreams, Veronique would stay with someone for comfort and be tricked easily.
The filming styles were also different in the two movies. In ‘The Double Life of Veronique’, director Kieślowski used the color yellow to create a warm them and a sense of unity between Veronique and Weronkia and black to represent Weronika’s death. He also used colors and camera filters to create an atmosphere that is ethereal. The elements portrayed was a fantasy and supernaturalism. The elements make you look deeper and pay more attention to the hints given in the beginning. In the beginning, the mom of the two little girls tells them to look, to watch, to pay attention to small details. It was insight as to what we would have to do throughout the film. The filming styles of ‘Mean Girls’ included flashbacks and many what if scenes. There was a difference between the ‘girl world’ and the ‘animal kingdom’. This showed us what happened with drama-filled situations in the real world or ‘girl world’ versus how it would happen in the ‘animal kingdom’. The use of bright lighting shows the type of expressions used. The light could also represent an insight into revealing the truth about the characters and their secrets and lies will come to the light. The use of the colors light purple, grey, red, blue and pink represent, power, extravagance, mystery, leadership, strength, loyalty, intelligence, and feminism.
The directors used many objects and symbols, motifs and allegories to purposefully convey the themes of the two movies. The objects and lessons used in ‘Mean Girls’ were the Burn Book, math, and queerness, royalty and the color pink. The Burn Book is a symbol of all the animosity that the junior girls at North Shore High harbor toward one another. It contains a page and photo for each student, becoming almost like an evil counterpart to a normal yearbook. The Burn Book becoming public dramatizes what would happen if everyone simultaneously learned what everyone else was saying behind their back: total chaos. The math lesson Cady learns throughout the movie is a motif that reveals how high school social logic often runs contrary to developing one's intellect and character. Damian and the Plastics discourage Cady from pursuing the math team, and the only student to encourage her is an awkward student named Kevin. Cady in fact conceals her own intelligence in order to make herself more likable to Aaron and the Plastics. Cady's revival of interest in math and participation in the math tournament at the end of the film signifies a larger decision on her part to concentrate on developing herself into a mature, intelligent individual. The queerness, and openness in the movie between the characters Janis and Damian. They are considered are outsiders at school because they are unlike the heterosexual students around them, they are expressing their gender and sexuality in fierce ways. The comparison of royalty in ‘Mean Girls’ uses the fact that they form an exclusive clique that claims superiority over the rest of the school. The color pink played a big role in the movie also because pink symbolizes femininity, and the unfairly imposed rules that the Plastics used to express the color. The generality of the color pink represents the way expectations begin to take over Cady's uniqueness.
The objects, motifs, symbols and allegories used in ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ were marionettes, reflections, the fallen ballerina and glass. The use of the marionettes was to tell the story of the two women and the idea of the puppet master reiterating their life story. The reflections represent a new point of view or another view of the characters. The glass represents an obstacle and hardships that were faced before and after. Weronika faced the fact that she had a weak heart and Veronique faced the heartbreak and absence of Weronika’s presence and not being loved back the same way. The fallen ballerina tells the life story from the perspective of the puppet master.
In conclusion, the films ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ and ‘Mean Girls’ are both similar and different and many ways. The films both share the theme of a lost identity. The directors interpret their meaning and many ways. They use the lighting and objects inserted into these films to create scenery and to give the films meaning and depth. All of the objects, literary devices, used in these two films give them free range to be defined and interpreted in many different ways.
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