Three Colors: White
Three Colors: White
In the second entry in Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy, Polish immigrant Karol Karol (Zamachowski) finds himself out of a marriage, a job and a country when his French wife, Dominique (Delpy), divorces him after six months due to his impotence. Forced to leave France after losing the business they jointly owned, Karol enlists fellow Polish expatriate Mikolah (Gajos) to smuggle him back to their homeland.
drqshadow reviewedFebruary 27, 2025
In losing his wife, a Polish expat is also stripped of his dignity. Shamed for his impotence before a divorce court, he’s summarily evicted from his Paris home, ousted from his post at a high-end hair salon, disassociated from his bank account and deprived of his passport. While living as a vagrant in a nearby subway station, fate introduces him to an amiable businessman who takes pity and finds a way to send him back to his motherland. There, he intends to set things right: pulling himself up by his bootstraps and seeking a twisted measure of revenge against the woman he holds responsible.
Roger Ebert called White an “anti-comedy,” but I don’t see much humor here. He likewise labeled its 1993 counterpart, Blue, an anti-tragedy, and while that story ultimately becomes uplifting, it does supply a boatload of tragic circumstances to underscore the point. Maybe Ebert was just stretching to find a unifying theme for the trilogy. I haven’t yet watched the third entry, Red, but while the first two chapters are similar in many ways, they’re antithetical in others. Where Blue was about growth through introspection, weathering an intense personal storm to find peace, White documents a more spiteful alternative. Here, our protagonist soaks up all manner of undeserved pain and dishonor, then uses it to fuel a burning, vindictive fire. He grows, too, but in unhealthier directions. The trauma deadens his nerves, nudging him towards greed and self-gratification at others’ expense. That many of his targets probably deserve the abuse is beside the point: he’s been willingly corrupted by his hardship.
It’s a bleak and somber story, filmed in bleak and somber tones. The frigid, wintery climates of France and Poland feel stark and bare; dreary settings for the film’s unhappy, borderline-hostile, subject matter. Curious that a film named for the essence of light could produce something so dirty and dark.