The Guild Cinema brought Krzysztof Kieslowski's seminal Three-Colors Trilogy to the big screen for some September matinees. A visit with our favorite filmmaker of all time has been long overdue. We soon will also revisit his masterpiece, "Dekalog."
WHITE (1994) (B+) - Kieslowski employs a lighter touch, but even his whimsical take on a failed marriage traffics in dark subjects and grim meditations on freedom and death. "White" is the poor middle-child of the trilogy, a slight but at times touching variation on the threaded theme of grief and longing.
Maybe because it has a male lead, this entry feels a bit off, not as compelling as "Red," "Blue" and "The Double Life of Veronique." Here, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) has been humiliated in Paris by his beautiful French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy, in her early 20s); she divorces him for failing to consummate the marriage. Karol is now broke and homeless; stripped of his papers, he strikes up an improbable friendship with another Pole he meets on the street, Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), and in slapstick fashion, Karol is smuggled back to Poland, where he returns to the salon he ran with his brother, Jurek (a drolly funny Jerzy Stuhr).
Mikolaj has offered Karol thousands of dollars if Karol will kill a person who wants to die, but Karol refuses. Karol takes another job as a bodyguard for a shady agency, and when he overhears the bosses speculating about buying up a swath of land, Karol gets to a few landowners first, and eventually earns a windfall, which he then spins into great wealth. He then puts into motion his ultimate revenge plot against Dominique.
Kieslowski, known as a tender and thoughtful storyteller, not only traffics in dark ideas here, but the film feels a bit choppy, with much of the action backloaded to the end of the film. Karol's transformation also feels rushed. But the narrative is always compelling.
Humor is threaded throughout, and it's often as dry as toast. The build-up of the revenge plot comes off as not merely retributive but also a bit misogynistic. Delpy is not allowed to be very effective here. She pops up only at key junctures. Meantime, every scene centers Zamachowski, as he alters his entire life in order to satisfy his monomanical focus.
When the subject of the trilogy came up with the venue owner, Keif, he asked which one was my favorite, and I said I had to view them again to choose between "Red" and "Blue." He replied, "No one ever picks 'White.'" That's because it's the weakest one. Maybe being saturated in white, it's just not as colorful as the others.
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