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| Three Colours: White review – Kieślowski’s expert black comedy of gangster capitalism | |
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| The middle film in the Colours trilogy features Julie Delpy as it takes a dagger to both France and Poland’s conception of equality and meritocracy | The middle film in the Colours trilogy features Julie Delpy as it takes a dagger to both France and Poland’s conception of equality and meritocracy |
| This is the second movie in Krzystztof Kieślowski’s great Colours trilogy, now on rerelease; here white is the colour of death, the colour of winter, the colour of orgasm (a climactic, screen-filling flash of pleasure) and also the colour of a clean slate and a fresh start about to be muddied and spoiled. Theoretically, it addresses not just the middle colour of the French flag, but the second tenet of the revolution as well – equality – which it does by dramatising some outrageous inequality. It also satirises the specious new equality and meritocracy of gangster capitalism, on the rise in post-Soviet Poland. | |
| Working again with composer Zbigniew Preisner, Kieślowski audaciously jolts the tone away from the dreamy, tragic and cosmic loneliness of Blue (whose protagonist, Juliette Binoche, is glimpsed again here) to a vinegary black comedy of marital breakdown, poverty and immigrant anxiety; it also contains one of the biggest, bleakest laugh lines in European cinema. Karol, the poverty-stricken Polish hairdresser in Paris has no money or passport, and finds he can only get back to Poland by stowing away in a trunk belonging to a Polish acquaintance. In Warsaw, this expensive-looking trunk is stolen by crooked baggage handlers who are furious to find only a homeless man inside. After being savagely beaten, Karol looks around at a snowy-white rubbish dump and gasps: “Home at last!” No one could accuse Kieślowski of romanticising his homeland. | |
| Zbigniew Zamachowski plays Karol; his marriage to Dominique, acted with glacial hauteur by Julie Delpy, has ended in divorce due to non-consummation, with Karol’s erectile dysfunction mirroring the dysfunction all around him. Apparently exploiting her advantage as a French citizen against the alien Pole, Dominique vengefully freezes their bank account and even torches their hair salon, threatening to blame the arson on him. Hapless Karol is befriended by a lugubrious and melancholy fellow Pole, Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos) who leads him back to Poland and makes him a bizarre financial offer to get him back on his feet. | Zbigniew Zamachowski plays Karol; his marriage to Dominique, acted with glacial hauteur by Julie Delpy, has ended in divorce due to non-consummation, with Karol’s erectile dysfunction mirroring the dysfunction all around him. Apparently exploiting her advantage as a French citizen against the alien Pole, Dominique vengefully freezes their bank account and even torches their hair salon, threatening to blame the arson on him. Hapless Karol is befriended by a lugubrious and melancholy fellow Pole, Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos) who leads him back to Poland and makes him a bizarre financial offer to get him back on his feet. |
| Back in the old country, Karol finds himself working for black market money-changers. He gets wind of western corporations intending to buy up valueless land thereabouts, moves like lightning to buy the land with Mikolaj’s cash and becomes a slick-haired capitalist himself, all the time dreaming of one day proving himself to Dominique with his new financial virility. | Back in the old country, Karol finds himself working for black market money-changers. He gets wind of western corporations intending to buy up valueless land thereabouts, moves like lightning to buy the land with Mikolaj’s cash and becomes a slick-haired capitalist himself, all the time dreaming of one day proving himself to Dominique with his new financial virility. |
| It’s an almost Jonsonian parable of an upwardly mobile hero with a downwardly mobile view on life: busking in the Paris metro, stowing away in luggage in the hold of a plane and becoming a shark-like entrepreneur wheeling and dealing in the new Polish business environment. Zamachowski’s sad, boyish performance is a droll counterpart to the worldly Mikołaj, a mysterious professional card player, wonderfully played by stage veteran Gajos. As for Dominique, it is a bit of a two-dimensional role (certainly compared to Binoche’s in the previous picture) and a rather male conception of villainous sexiness, but Delpy carries it off with panache. | It’s an almost Jonsonian parable of an upwardly mobile hero with a downwardly mobile view on life: busking in the Paris metro, stowing away in luggage in the hold of a plane and becoming a shark-like entrepreneur wheeling and dealing in the new Polish business environment. Zamachowski’s sad, boyish performance is a droll counterpart to the worldly Mikołaj, a mysterious professional card player, wonderfully played by stage veteran Gajos. As for Dominique, it is a bit of a two-dimensional role (certainly compared to Binoche’s in the previous picture) and a rather male conception of villainous sexiness, but Delpy carries it off with panache. |
| What a strange confection White is – an opera of male agony and outrageously implausible picaresque adventure. Yet it succeeds amazingly on its own melodramatic terms. | What a strange confection White is – an opera of male agony and outrageously implausible picaresque adventure. Yet it succeeds amazingly on its own melodramatic terms. |
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| Three Colours White is released on 7 April in cinemas. | Three Colours White is released on 7 April in cinemas. |