Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, Marcin Latallo
Photography: Edward Klosinski
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Editor: Urszula Lesiak
Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr
Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski positively seems to love the dense, evocative, confounding narratives he constructs based on abstractions and ironical moral precepts. His best movie—if you want to call a 10-hour TV miniseries a movie, and I do—was Dekalog, which worked with the biblical 10 Commandments, one at a time, with a double handful of masterpieces. His breakthrough Three Colors trilogy, the last movies he made—he died in 1996 at the age of 54—is similarly focused on the colors of the French flag, the “blue, white, and red,” typically radicalizing their meanings of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” (respectively). We have already seen the radical liberty, in Three Colors: Blue, of a woman who has lost everything. Now we encounter the radical equality of a bitter failing marriage in Paris between a Polish immigrant, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), and a French woman, Dominique (Julie Delpy).
Dominique is divorcing Karol because he has never been able to consummate the marriage, as she announces in open court, one more way she can humiliate him. It’s something of a preoccupation of hers. She has a cruel streak a mile deep—her name hammers that point home (while his has intimations of femininity and submission). Karol tries to explain himself at the hearing but the divorce is granted, which ruins him. He is homeless, penniless, begging on the street. Eventually he befriends a Polish national in Paris who helps him find his way back home by wedging him into a suitcase for the flight.
Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski positively seems to love the dense, evocative, confounding narratives he constructs based on abstractions and ironical moral precepts. His best movie—if you want to call a 10-hour TV miniseries a movie, and I do—was Dekalog, which worked with the biblical 10 Commandments, one at a time, with a double handful of masterpieces. His breakthrough Three Colors trilogy, the last movies he made—he died in 1996 at the age of 54—is similarly focused on the colors of the French flag, the “blue, white, and red,” typically radicalizing their meanings of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” (respectively). We have already seen the radical liberty, in Three Colors: Blue, of a woman who has lost everything. Now we encounter the radical equality of a bitter failing marriage in Paris between a Polish immigrant, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), and a French woman, Dominique (Julie Delpy).
Dominique is divorcing Karol because he has never been able to consummate the marriage, as she announces in open court, one more way she can humiliate him. It’s something of a preoccupation of hers. She has a cruel streak a mile deep—her name hammers that point home (while his has intimations of femininity and submission). Karol tries to explain himself at the hearing but the divorce is granted, which ruins him. He is homeless, penniless, begging on the street. Eventually he befriends a Polish national in Paris who helps him find his way back home by wedging him into a suitcase for the flight.
It’s a good thing for me that both Wikipedia and IMDb note White as a comedy, at least in part (“comedy-drama,” “comedy / drama / romance”), because Kieslowski plays it so straight and so broad that you kind of feel it might be impolite to laugh at these black humor absurdities and dizzying downward spirals. Kieslowski once again carries his aesthetic all the way into the production design. So White takes place in winter and there is snow. Also porcelain. And marble. Composer Zbigniew Preisner is on hand once again, with a slightly lighter hand, as White does not involve the upper bourgeoisie and their love for the high arts. But he and Kieslowski do resort to the same trick a couple of times of letting the orchestra swell up big, accompanied by brief screen blackouts, at moments of high emotion.
Karol’s homeward journey, obviously, is where I should have picked up on the comedy. The suitcase, instead of being recovered by his friend from the baggage claim carousel (we get numerous shots in the first half of suitcases trundling down conveyors), is stolen by airport workers, who take it to a remote wasteland field to open it for the plunder. When they find it’s this cramped guy stowing away, they are furious and beat the crap out of him. It’s funny now in the retelling, but Kieslowski is generally so intense and seemingly humorless that it was easy for me to miss in the watching.
Further absurdities follow. In Poland, Karol is a well-known, popular, and gifted hairdresser. All the women ask for him. But his more immediate plans are for revenge on Dominique. He finds work as a bodyguard for a gangster. He seems unlikely to be good at organized crime, and he isn’t really, but where there’s a will there’s a way. He is soon raising the capital for his scheme by double-crossing and taking advantage of the gangsters. Needless to say, they are not happy about it, but Karol is as resourceful as he is enterprising and finds ways to keep them at bay.
The main equality here, or search for it, is the age-old one between men and women, but there is also a political one represented by their separate nationalities in the context of the coming of the EU. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but they aren’t, and neither, of course, are France and Poland. Karol’s plot is elaborate and unlikely, but he pulls it off more or less, though the ending is suitably bittersweet.
The cast is small but notably stuffed with Kieslowski regulars, starting with Zamachowski, who is also in Blue and Red as well as Dekalog. Karol’s friend Mikolaj is played by Janusz Gajos, also in Dekalog. The complicated friendship and subplot between Karol and Mikolaj turns on suicide and is handled really well, another neat balance between comedy and drama (indeed, profound pathos). Karol has another friend in Poland, Jurek (Jerzy Stuhr), a partner in hairdressing who is a lifelong friend but Karol’s inferior as a hairdresser. Stuhr also has a memorable turn in Dekalog. They are all quite good here.
That leaves Julie Delpy as sort of a disappointing ringer. She doesn’t get much screen time in White and the role requires her basically to be in a constant state of various extremes—vindictive rage, sexual frustration, a bent toward sadism, and grief. Delpy, who is so likable in the Before series of movies as the amiable Celine, perfect girlfriend (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, etc.), is sadly not up to what’s required of her here, though it’s hard to imagine who would be.
I saw all the Three Colors movies when they were new and I recall the consensus among friends was that White is the weakest, a bias I have carried since (though I wasn’t entirely sure whether it might have been Blue). I might still be inclined that way. I’ll know more when I see Red again, which I recall as my favorite, maybe because it was the first one I saw then. But even if it is the weakest of the three, White has a lot to recommend it, if you like anything about the way Kieslowski packs a movie together.
Karol’s homeward journey, obviously, is where I should have picked up on the comedy. The suitcase, instead of being recovered by his friend from the baggage claim carousel (we get numerous shots in the first half of suitcases trundling down conveyors), is stolen by airport workers, who take it to a remote wasteland field to open it for the plunder. When they find it’s this cramped guy stowing away, they are furious and beat the crap out of him. It’s funny now in the retelling, but Kieslowski is generally so intense and seemingly humorless that it was easy for me to miss in the watching.
Further absurdities follow. In Poland, Karol is a well-known, popular, and gifted hairdresser. All the women ask for him. But his more immediate plans are for revenge on Dominique. He finds work as a bodyguard for a gangster. He seems unlikely to be good at organized crime, and he isn’t really, but where there’s a will there’s a way. He is soon raising the capital for his scheme by double-crossing and taking advantage of the gangsters. Needless to say, they are not happy about it, but Karol is as resourceful as he is enterprising and finds ways to keep them at bay.
The main equality here, or search for it, is the age-old one between men and women, but there is also a political one represented by their separate nationalities in the context of the coming of the EU. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but they aren’t, and neither, of course, are France and Poland. Karol’s plot is elaborate and unlikely, but he pulls it off more or less, though the ending is suitably bittersweet.
The cast is small but notably stuffed with Kieslowski regulars, starting with Zamachowski, who is also in Blue and Red as well as Dekalog. Karol’s friend Mikolaj is played by Janusz Gajos, also in Dekalog. The complicated friendship and subplot between Karol and Mikolaj turns on suicide and is handled really well, another neat balance between comedy and drama (indeed, profound pathos). Karol has another friend in Poland, Jurek (Jerzy Stuhr), a partner in hairdressing who is a lifelong friend but Karol’s inferior as a hairdresser. Stuhr also has a memorable turn in Dekalog. They are all quite good here.
That leaves Julie Delpy as sort of a disappointing ringer. She doesn’t get much screen time in White and the role requires her basically to be in a constant state of various extremes—vindictive rage, sexual frustration, a bent toward sadism, and grief. Delpy, who is so likable in the Before series of movies as the amiable Celine, perfect girlfriend (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, etc.), is sadly not up to what’s required of her here, though it’s hard to imagine who would be.
I saw all the Three Colors movies when they were new and I recall the consensus among friends was that White is the weakest, a bias I have carried since (though I wasn’t entirely sure whether it might have been Blue). I might still be inclined that way. I’ll know more when I see Red again, which I recall as my favorite, maybe because it was the first one I saw then. But even if it is the weakest of the three, White has a lot to recommend it, if you like anything about the way Kieslowski packs a movie together.
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