Three Colours: White

Model Dominique (Julie Delpy) obtains a divorce from her Polish hairdresser husband Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) on the grounds that their six-month old marriage has not been consumated, and throws him out of their hair salon. Distraught and penniless Karol takes to begging on the Metro where he meets another depressed Pole. Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), who smuggles him back to the homeland in the only logical way. There Karol's fortunes improve rapidly thanks to the oppurtunities opened by a free market society and he determines to win back Dominique.

Where Blue and Red come dangerously close to resembling Volkswagen commercials for the existential woman, White only benefits from being set in and filmed on the director's native soil, and from a brilliant central performance by Zamachowski (who appeared in Dekalog 6), who is at turns a downtrodden Norman-Wisdom-type and a vicious scheming capitalist.

Kieslowski deliberately ignores the conventional interpretations of the title colour such as purity.,candour, innocence and hope: instead white is the colour of snow, weddings, alabaster busts, and, of course, orgasms. White is also the second colour of the Tricolor and symbolises the egalite principle of the French revoloution. Here, however Kieslowski presents a character who seeks superiority rather than equality and in a capitalist society he achieves it; though as with Blue where Julie relinquishes her freedom. Karol gives it all up in the name of love.

White was called a comedy by the critics who promptly slagged it off for not being funny enough: in fact the humour in this film stems only from the portrayal of Poland after the fall of Communism, apart from that this is the story of a couple whose attempts to destroy each other are actually declarations of love.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96