THREE COLORS: WHITE
A film review by Gareth Rees
Copyright 1994 Gareth Rees
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski Starring: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr Camera: Edward Klosinski Producer: Marin Karmitz Editor: Ursula Lesiak Music: Zbigniew Preisner Duration: 89 minutes France/Poland/Switzerland 1994
Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is a Polish hairdresser who has married glamorous and successful model Dominique (Julie Delpy) and moved with her to Paris. However, he is impotent and unable to consummate the marriage, so she divorces him, frames him for the arson of her business, and throws him out onto the street with a large trunk containing all his possessions. Despite all this, she tells him that she still loves him and wants him.
Karol takes up playing sad Polish folksongs on a comb-and-paper harmonica in the Metro, and meets Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), a depressive Polish chess player. The two of them conceive a plan to get Karol back to Poland despite his lack of passport, and once there, Karol determines that he is going to win Dominique back: when he has achieved equality (personal equality, financial equality and equality of power) with her, then he will be able to perform sexually.
The films lurches unsteadily between comedy and tragedy. Zbigniew Zamachowski reprises his comic persona from THE DECALOGUE: TEN with initial success as the whole world (incarnate in a pigeon outside the divorce court) seems to dump on him. He's less convincing as a cunning and successful businessman later in the film, but the sharp and funny portrayal of the new free-market Poland, where everything is for sale and where a few lucky people make money through being in the right place at the right time saves this section. The ending is so sad and yet such an inevitable and appropriate come-uppance for both of the main characters that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
If WHITE is unfair to anyone, it's to Dominique. Kieslowski is sometimes accused of misogyny, and certainly in this film it isn't clear at all why Dominique behaves as she does. We never see enough of her point of view to determine why she loves this clown of a hairdresser or why she is forced to stand up in court and say that she does not love him.
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