The irony in the Three Colors Trilogy is wittier than that of many other satirical films on society’s customs, because its characters aren’t wickedly clever, cynical or deliberately evil: they’re everyday people and they’re not fully aware of the consequences of their actions. Besides that, all three films avoid addressing the ideals of the French flag – liberty, equality and fraternity – in their most obvious denotations; political, social, or cultural. In White, equality takes a completely different form and is achieved not through an equal treatment of both parts, but through parallel revenge.
White is neither a dark comedy nor a romantic drama, and tells the story of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish immigrant in France who’s divorced to the local Dominique (Julie Delpy) and loses everything he has in very quick steps, leading to an emergencial escape to Poland to start things over. When he arrives and is left beaten up in the snow and he welcomes himself home in relief, it’s not certain whether one should laugh at his sarcasm or feel sorry for his tragic downfall. This uncertainty drives the film forward with charm: since the film’s about the process through which Karol faces his new life and directs it towards a return to Dominique and he ends his journey as a predictable man, Karol’s tracks are not our own. One of the main themes, an ironic tango by the unique Zbigniew Preisner, is one of his main supporters, sounding like a melancholic tune or a whisper of comedy depending on the viewer’s point of view.
White is considered to be the black sheep of the trilogy, both for its lighter tone and for its lesser quality next to Blue and Red. While it’s true that Blue is a superior film and a masterpiece, I believe its successor more than deserves its position in the trilogy: after a first half that’s only satisfying, the film grows out to be great, reaching moments of heartwarming poignancy, notoriously the final moments between Karol and Dominique and the turning point in the friendship between Karol and Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), a Polish family man whom he meets before returning home. The use of color relates to that in Blue as white links the protagonist not only to his recent past in France, but also to his pre-marriage past in Poland, the latter revealed to us as a place of nostalgic snowy landscapes and bright lights In Preisner’s score and the painful performances of Zamachowski and Gajos, there are hints of the Polish desire to restart and reconcile with the rest of Western Europe found in earlier films, such as Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, and they’re sadly beautiful.
Equality, as addressed in the film, is twice as ironic as imagined, because Karol wishes to get even with Dominique by himself, inadvertently unsure of what he’s doing, and because the fact that his comeback resonates to that of his own origins forces us to question whether this story is simply a new interpretation of the concept. This is a challenging work of art that is all the more interesting because it’s understated and part of the filmography of a director whose work’s recognition is still under construction.
Three Colors: White
Year: 1994
Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski
Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr
Berlin Film Festival: Silver Bear for Best Director
The Hand Grenade 