Three Colours: White

Screening: 2 June 2003

France/Switzerland/Poland 1994 (subtitles)
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Leading players: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Jerzy Stuhr.

Synopsis

Émigré Karol is booted out of their Paris home by his French wife Dominique. After losing enthusiasm for busking in the Paris Metro, he looks for a cheap way to make it back to Poland to start a new life. He hits upon the idea of air travel at a discount, thanks to the use of a friend's suitcase. As with everything in this film, his arrival is not just the product of his own scheming: some unwitting luggage thieves play their part too before he hits the streets of Warsaw.

Fate plays many more twists as we wonder if the director is smiling from his new vantage point even as we watch. In this post-communist epoch, Karol finds he can buy anything. He plots a new life and a little vengeance against Dominique, thanks to a newly-purchased corpse and a few other little schemes.

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This, the most Polish of the trilogy "Three Colours", has an urgent sense of having a story to tell. It tells it with an easy, though black, sense of humour and an incomparable line-up of stars, most of them Polish.