Trois couleurs: Blanc

Plot synopsis:
After opening with a brief, seemingly irrelevant scene of a suitcase on an airport carousel, the story quickly focuses on a Paris divorce court where Polish immigrant Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is pleading with the judge (the same legal proceedings that Juliette Binoche's character Julie briefly stumbled upon in the previous film 'Blue'). Despite his difficulty in understanding French, Karol is made to understand that his French wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) does not love him. The grounds for divorce are humiliating: Karol was unable to consummate the marriage. Along with his wife, he loses his means of support (a beauty salon they jointly owned), his legal residency in France, and the rest of his cash in a series of mishaps, and is soon a beggar living on the streets. He only retains a 2-franc coin that he got as change from the phone while trying to speak with his now ex-wife.In a Paris Métro station, performing songs for spare change, Karol meets and is befriended by another Pole, Mikoaj (Janusz Gajos). While Karol has lost his wife and his property, Mikoaj is married and successful, he offers Karol a job consisting of killing someone who wants to be dead but does not have enough courage to do it himself. Through a hazardous scheme, Mikoaj helps him return to Poland hidden in the suitcase shown at the beginning of the film, which is later stolen by employees at the airport. The airport thieves, eager to find something valuable inside their stolen trunk, are angry when they open it and they find Karol inside. The thieves beat up Karol and leave him behind in a nearby garbage dump.Despite his mishap, Karol returns to working as a hairdresser with his brother (Jerzy Stuhr) whom he now moves in with. After a while, Karol, no longer content to working at his brother's salon, quits his job and sets up to make himself a pot of cash in newly capitalist Poland. Karol takes another job as as a bodyguard in a seemingly innocent cash exchange office. Mikoaj meets Karol in a Warsaw Metro tunnel for the execution of the "suicide", it turns out to be that Mikoaj is the intended victim and asks Karol to kill him. Karol shoots a blank into Mikoaj's chest and asks him if he really wants to go through with it as the next bullet is real. Mikoaj refuses and is able to feel alive again. Using his position as a deceptively foolish bodyguard, Karol spies on his bosses and discovers their scheme to purchase different pieces of land that they knew were going to be targeted by big companies for development and resell for large profits. Karol beats them to it, and then tells his ex-bosses that if they kill him all his estate shall go to the Catholic Church, and they are therefore forced to purchase all the land from him. With the money he gained from this scheme and with the payment from Mikoaj, the two go into business (of a vaguely defined but possibly illegal nature) together.Karol becomes ruthlessly ambitious, focusing his energies on money-making schemes while learning to speak French and brooding over his wife's abandonment. He uses his new financial influence in a world where, as several characters observe, "you can buy anything" to execute a complex scheme to first win back Dominique, and then destroy her life.Karol takes his revenge against his ex-wife by faking his own death after which she shows up for his funeral. Karol then sneaks into her hotel room and has sex with her to prove his potency again. Then afterwords, Dominique is arrested and imprisoned for his 'murder'. The final image of the film shows Karol secretly visiting his wife in prison and staring at Dominique through the window of her prison cell. Karol then suddenly feels ashamed at himself for this revenge plot against his wife and openly cries... realizing that he must finally let go of her in order to move on with his own life.

Tags: comedy, mystery, cruelty, murder, intrigue, flashback, psychedelic, revenge, sentimental

Review:
Towards the end of the film, the husband again recalls the wedding as he sets off for the wife's prison.Kieslowski's treatise on equality is based on marriage as a great leveller with the doves flutter captured on the soundtrack appearing as a frequent reminder of marital bonds.
His desire for revenge blows out his residual flickering flame of love after having suffered unforgivable affronts devised by his heartless wife."Trzy kolory: Bialy" (Three colors: White), second episode inspired to the three colors of the French flag and to the three principles of the French Revolution (Freedom, Equality and Fraternity), brings back to us two old acquaintances, Zbigniew Zamachowski (very similar to the pathetic Italian character Fantozzi,) and Jerzy Stuhr.
The inborn sense of Kieslovski's BLACK humor comes out here in all its might almost counterbalancing the concept of absolute WHITE connected with he story."Three colors: white" is very different from the other two episodes of the trilogy, but nonetheless the unmistakable touch of the genius can be generously found in the accurate care of the details, in the emotional intensity of the dialogs, in the careful analysis of the individual values, in his safe distance from the events represented by him, in his constant application of the principle of casualness and in his large use of metaphors (look for instance at the sequences of simultaneous flights of pigeons, symbolizing an open concept of freedom often cherished in his works).
It is not only difficult to comment separately on the three parts of Kieslowski's trilogy, it seems obvious that the filmmaker wants us to do just the opposite:  view them in order, Blue, White, and Red, and consider them together as one complete work.
The film is the second series in the Three Colours trilogy which started with the film Blue and ends with Red. The film takes place in France where a man named Karol Karol whose wife Dominique just divorced him.
After these two great films I'm looking forward to completing the series by watching Red. Judging by what I thought of Blue and White, I'm sure I'm going to like Red very much as well..
Review In A Nutshell:White tells the story of a male Polish hairdresser, Karol, who was left by his wife, Dominique, with nothing.
I found the score to be effective, particularly during the moments where the film wants us to feel sorry for Karol or when he examines or thinks about his one true love, Dominique.
Julie Delpy was also pretty good in the role, but it would have been better if she was given a bit more screen time; then again this is Karol's story, not hers.White may not be a step up as I hoped it would be from Blue, but it's still a great piece of work from Kieslowski.
Krzysztof Kieslowski's second installment in his "Three Colors" trilogy does not quite reach the greatness of his earlier or latter work, but is still a strangely interesting viewing experience that ends up being a dominant success by its final act in spite of some shortcomings.
It is modern-day France and a Polish hairdresser (Zbigniew Zamachowski) and his amazingly beautiful French wife (Julie Delpy) are going through a messy divorce due to Zamachowski's inability to perform sexually.
The second film in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Blue, White & Red" trilogy, "White" (1993), is decidedly lighter in tone than its predecessor and should manage to appeal to a wider audience.
Sharp-eyed fans of "Blue" will note Ms. Binoche's Julie character in "White"'s opening courtroom scene, as well as the same old lady at the recycling bin (this latter background character would also, strangely, resurface in "Red"); just some fun elements to help tie this loosely linked trio of films together, I suppose.
Are we supposed to think that Karol and Dominique are equals of sorts by the film's end?
White is the second film in Krzysztof's Kieslowski's Color Trilogy(The first is Blue; The third is Red).
As I am sure you know the film is based on the colours of the French flag and their symbolism blue white red, is thus liberty, equality and fraternity.
Although I enjoyed "Bleu" and "Rouge" better in this trilogy, "Blanc" is a wonderful story in its own right about a husband who takes the ultimate revenge on a beautiful wife who has "cuckolded" him at the start of their marriage.Again, Kieslowski brilliantly weaves together individuals who greatly impact each other's lives in ways unexpected as the characters move from France to Poland.
Some of this is not done in a very convincing manner, and there's enough hokum to please a sit- com producer, but in the area of tricky plot twists and original story ideas this gets accolades.Premise: Little Polish guy living in Paris, an adorable and prize-winning hair dresser, is divorced by his beautiful French wife, whom he loves passionately, because of his impotence.
I'm sorry to confess that I became bored at about the one hour mark and started fidgeting like mad until the movie reached its unsatisfying and seemingly unfinished ending.I would go with "Red" or "Blue" personally, though "White" may be worth seeing for the sake of comparison..
There are even a little more happy moments in this one.Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is a Polish guy and the movie starts with his divorce from Dominique (Julie Delpy).
But, he had to get back to Poland somehow, and he did.The rest of the movie shows Karol using his wits to move from being a hairdresser in a very small salon to becoming a wealthy man with a chauffeur-driven Volvo.People keep telling him, "You can buy anything in Poland now." I assume this is Director Kieslowski's way of reminding us that in 1994, the Polish Republic was only five years old.
a movie which has a very simplistic senario but at every turn asstounds and this happens right up till the increadable finale and at all times is very real in terms of human interaction of the charactors which make the movie hit home a lot harder at the end of the movie it makes you feel lots of strong conflicting emotions the main one being im glad i watched three colours white by far the best in my opinion of the trilogy.
I think that one of the more interesting things Krzysztof Kieslowski has going on in this trilogy of his is the way that he toys with people's expectations.Blue started with a woman losing her husband and child, and the whole thing was this very bleak and wrenching drama of a human being struggling with unimaginable loss, yet it never became a melodramatic tear-fest and strangely ended in a bittersweet, optimistic fashion.
White follows the same idea, just in a much different genre.We open with Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) in court, getting divorced from his wife (Julie Delpy) against his wishes, and the first act is a lot of tired clichés of the hapless loser getting cuckolded by his bitch ex-wife.
The film opens with a nightmare situation, a Polish man played by Zamachowski whose wife, a callous Julie Delpy, is divorcing him and stating to a whole courtroom that the reason is because he consistently can't perform in bed.
The second part of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colours" trilogy, this one represents white.Much of the whiteness comes from the bleak snowy landscapes of post-Communist Poland, where the central character, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) finds himself.
Talk about living out of a suitcase.Part of Karol's determination against adversity is to gain some kind of revenge on his ex-wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), and the scheme he dreams up involves faking his own death.Part droll comedy, part satire, this is full of clever details and quirky moments, although the story does lose focus from time to time.
With this one obviously named White and dealing with the value of equality.Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish citizen, gets divorced by his French wife for reasons of impotence.
While 'Three Colours: White' may be the weakest of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colours Trilogy", that is in no way saying that it is a bad film (to me it was actually still an extremely good one) and that it's testament to the trilogy's consistently high overall quality.'Three Colours: White' could have been a little longer to give more development to the two leads' relationship and to Julie Delpy's character perhaps, and there are a couple of parts that do strain credibility.
Continuing the theme of France's national motto (liberty, equality, fraternity), "Trois couleurs: Blanc" ("Three Colors: White" in English) looks at equality, as a divorced man returns to his native Poland and eventually decides to get even with his ex-wife.As in the first installment, Kieślowski uses the title color to tell the story.
In the story of 'White', one of the segments as part of the "Three-Colors Trilogy" that capped off the career of Kieslowski (this was released second after 'Blue', just before 'Red'), Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is married to Dominique (Julie Delpy), but at the start of the film they're getting a divorce.
A part of me wishes there was just a scene or two more development of Karol/Dominique's relationship, but on the other hand it's easy to see why Kieslowski keeps it to what it is: love that is more about need and desire than full-on compatibility, on both sides.It goes by in a brisk 90 minutes, and Delpy is there for all of 20 minutes, tops (her appearance on the cover is more for advertisement purposes).
He's an average, shlubby every-man who is three dimensional: likable, unlikable, fairly slick one minute and idiotic the next.For a director who is often looked at as having very "Heavy" films, and for good reason, a film like Three Colors: White is, for lack of a better word, fun, and it's enjoyable mostly to see the director work in such a mood - though the ending turns out to be rather tragic in what it suggests will come for these characters' double crossings..
Second of a trilogy of films dealing with contemporary French society shows a Polish immigrant (Zbigniew Zamachowski) who wants to get even with his former wife (Julie Delpy).Apparently, the film has a political subtext, in which Karol's impotence and financial helplessness in France, and subsequent rise as a somewhat shady capitalist, mirror the attempts of Poland to advance from its disadvantaged position within Europe.
In this movie we watch a separated couple and the man of this couple who tries get back his ex-wife.Krzysztof Kieslowski directs a masterpiece again and I think that the interpretations of Zbigniew Zamachowski as the husband (Karol Karol), Julie Delpy as the ex-wife (Dominique) and Janusz Gajos as a "friend" of the husband (Mikolaj)."Three Colors: White" is a really nice movie and I liked more than the first one because in this movie we watch some different personalities of people and we also observe how difficult is to get threw some situations of life and get over them..
While notable for it's gritty and naturalistic milieu depictions, sterling production design by production designers Halina Dobrowolska and Claude Lenoir, cinematography by Polish cinematographer Edward Klosiski, the fine editing by Polish film editor Urszula Lesiak and symbolic use of colors, this character-driven and narrative-driven comedy-drama from the early 1990s which stands out from the other parts of the Three Colors trilogy much due to it's humorous tone, depicts an appealing and incisive study of character and contains an exceptional film score by Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner which emphasizes it's poetic atmosphere.This instantly involving, somewhat romantic, somewhat mysterious, charming and witty independent film which examines themes like identity, liberty, destiny and love, is impelled and reinforced by it's brilliant narrative structure, substantial character development, colorful characters, quick-witted dialog and the memorable acting performances by Polish actor Zbigniew Zamachowski, French-American actress, screenwriter and director Julie Delphy and Polish actor Janusz Gajos.
White is the second of Krzysztof Kieslowski trilogy begins with a suitcase on a carousel at an airport but switches to a man in a Paris divorce court who has trouble understanding French, that his wife, Dominique(Julie Delpy) does not love him.
Those scenes which show how Karol stages his own death to get back his life, i.e. his wife, bear the mark of the creative hammer of Krzysztof Kieslowski; the hot anvil of his always-excellent lighting arrangement & camera-work also delineates the gusto of the Polish procreator of films; the never-before soothing music, too, seems to come from a far away place.
In spite of its unusual genre trappings the film is still very much of a piece with the director's other work: Kieslowski's visual style is immediately recognizable, particularly in the way he uses the camera to represent the viewpoint of his characters-here most noticeably with flashbacks to a wedding.The color white is used in the film to symbolize purity-specifically purity of a sexual nature.
Each movie is separate and doesn't feature characters from the previous one(s) (except at the end of Red, but it made no difference to the story and was essentially Kieslowski showing off).The first, Blue, was engaging and mostly reasonably interesting.
Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), named so for his clear link to the Everyman we all know as Charlie Chaplin (the actor has a passing resemblance to the character) is the man in question, who has lost everything and in turn is marinating in two very different emotions: the desire to get even, but the need to get his wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) back.The tone established in WHITE is fate.
I can see that in the scene when Karol meets Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), an enigmatic man who passes him by and recognizes a song he is playing on a comb: their interaction under the streets of Paris feels almost preordained and it's not surprising when soon Mikolaj, a man with a secret, is helping Karol get back to Poland.What is surprising is the way these events happen, but I will not reveal them because of two things: one of them has to do with a test of friendship that suddenly swings the film into high gear and liberates it from its moral heaviness seen in the first third of the film, and secondly, because Kieszlowski connects several disjointed scenes involving Dominique and Karol that will eventually reveal themselves not to be out of time or imagined but very real.THREE COLORS: WHITE is all about the symbolic nature of the color inasmuch as 'equality'.
White doves come into a scene where Mikolaj, an angel of sorts, saves Karol from a grim destiny, and the angelic face of love is the white bust that survives most of the film as Karol begins his plans to move against Dominique.At the same time we have two moments of its position in the French flag that also come into play when seen as a trilogy.
I liked the first film of this trilogy, but this second one is making me wonder whether it will be worthwhile to watch the third.Its obvious that Kieslowski is trying somehow to speak of the eternal issues, love, death, wealth, poverty, loyalty, betrayal...
unfortunately it just doesn't work.(Spoiler warning: don't read further if you don't want to know anything about what happens in this film)We have here an impotant husband in love with a beautiful wife, who says she needs him desperately but divorces him and frames him for arson.The despondent husband becomes a homeless street dweller, trying to get some money for food by playing a homemade comb and waxpaper kazoo.He randomly meets someone who helps him get back to Poland, at which point, through a set of very unlikely circumstances he quickly becomes super-rich.Then he stages his own death to get his wife back, and when she has proved she really does love him, he frames her for the murder (also in a very unbelievable way).
And while it's not as powerful or complex as "Blue", it does play as a very unique and flowing transition between the two more dominant and relevant films."White" is a story about a man named Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a professional Polish hair-cutter who marries a young and beautiful French woman.
OK, not really fair in fact: I can see some freedom in Blue, in how Julie chooses to deal her own way with her grief; I can see some fraternity in Red, in how Valentine and the old judge learn from each other; but I can't see any equality, neither in White, nor in the others (because I guess this three themes are not that simply distributed between the three movies).
It feels like the storytellers wanted to really focus on the irony of love/revenge at the end of the film that the journey getting there wasn't fleshed out in a meaningful way.
"Three Colors:Blue" and 'Red' are both fascinating films, and I will say the same of 'White', however there are a number of story inconsistencies in this movie that give me pause.
In White Karol is in the exact same position where Blue's Julie was, because he still loves his wife.
There is real liberty in "Blue" and real fraternity (allowing for the fact that the English word doesn't mean quite what the French one does) in "Red", but no equality in "White"; it is at most an ideal that the one or two characters pursue (Karol, perhaps, or even more doubtfully, Dominique) - and even this is saying too much.
Basically Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is a Plish hairdresser working in France, with a beautiful wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy) whom he obsessively loves, but is in the process of divorcing for his inability to consummate the marriage.
The middle film of Polish-French film director Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors (Trois Couleurs) trilogy of Blue, White, and Red is a very black comedy, and generally considered the weakest of the three films.