Trois couleurs: Blanc, Trzy kolory: Biały

Krzysztof Kieślowski (1994)

Visual beautification, a feature of Three Colours: Blue (1993), is conspicuous by its absence from the second film in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s trilogy.  It may help that much of the action of Three Colours: White takes place in soulless parts of Kieślowski’s native city of Warsaw rather than in Paris.  But even the latter, where the film begins, is distinctly unlovely.  As the Polish protagonist, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), ascends the steps of the Palais de Justice, to attend a divorce hearing, his shabby appearance isn’t improved by pigeon shit landing on his coat (though this serves him right for heading straight towards a clutch of birds on the steps, causing them to scatter into the air).  In the aftermath of his divorce, events quickly conspire to turn Karol, a barber by profession, into a beggar, reduced to performing songs on a comb on a Métro platform.  The location, grey and deserted, underlines his desolation.

The cause of Karol’s problems is the one conventionally glamorous element of White, his soon-to-be-ex-wife:  Dominique (Julie Delpy) is also compelling evidence that beauty is only skin deep.  It remains a mystery how these two got together – other than hairdressing, they’ve nothing in common – but it’s crystal clear that Dominique is a bitch.  She wants a divorce because, or so she claims in court, Karol was unable to consummate their marriage.  Besides, he can’t even speak French properly.  She turfs him out of their apartment, above the couple’s hairdressing salon; when he breaks back in, Dominique, after refusing sex, sets fire to the place.  One of the few travellers on Kieślowski’s version of the Paris underground is the affluent Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos), a fellow Pole, who offers Karol money to kill someone.  Karol refuses but – following a phone call to Dominique, who asks him to listen to her having sex with another man – seeks Mikołaj’s help in getting back to Poland.

Karol arrives in Warsaw hidden in Mikołaj’s large suitcase, which is promptly stolen by some airport workers.  When they discover the case’s contents, and that Karol is penniless, these men beat him up, abandoning him in the middle of nowhere.  Karol finds his way back to the city and a warm welcome at the home of his elder brother, Jurek (Jerzy Stuhr).  He too is a hairdresser and lives above the shop, where Karol began and now resumes his career.  But only part-time – he also gets a job as a guard at a cash exchange office.  This proves to be Karol’s entrée to a life of crime – a highly lucrative one, thanks to his unexpected resource and cunning.  Mikołaj turns out to be the someone that he wanted Karol to kill.  When he renews the request, Karol shoots a blank into his chest and offers his friend a chance to change his mind before a real bullet comes his way.  Mikołaj takes the chance, the two men go into business partnership and Karol, now a ruthlessly effective entrepreneur, makes a fortune.

He still misses Dominique, though, and improves his French in the hope of winning her back.  When he phones her in Paris, she hangs up.  So he decides on revenge:  tit for tat is what égalité, supposedly the key theme here, appears in part to signify in White‘s black-comedy world.  His wealth and contacts, along with Mikołaj and Jurek, help Karol to devise and execute a plan to fake his own death and frame Dominique, who’s set to inherit most of his vast wealth according to the terms of his will, for his murder.  (He makes sure that, before she’s arrested, she learns that he’s alive and that they sleep together.)  In the film’s closing sequence, Karol stands outside the prison where Dominique is serving time and looks up to see her through the window of her cell.  She sees him too and signs that she would like to remarry Karol, bringing tears to his eyes.

Although I didn’t get a great deal out of Three Colours: White, I preferred it to Three Colours: Blue.  Kieślowski’s and Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s screenplay is coherently fabular (and absurdist).  Where Blue, among other things, celebrated European unity at the end of the Cold War, White functions as a sharply satirical portrait of suddenly post-Communist Poland in the early 1990s:  this is a land where, as a line in the script confirms, anything can be bought if you have the funds – including a Russian corpse.  Within this scheme, Zbigniew Preisner’s insistent, hyper-Polish score works well.  Zbigniew Zamachowski – short, pugnacious, innately humorous but melancholy too – is perfectly cast as the underdog hero, a stray mongrel who then turns terrier and starts to bite.  The standout in the supporting cast is Jerzy Stuhr, as Karol’s loyal, fusspot brother.

26 May 2023