Chapter Two - Three Colors: White
By Brett Beach
November 24, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Confession: I have viewed a very small fraction of director Krzysztof Kieslowski's entire total output. I make this confession because of how strongly the ones I have seen have impacted me. To this day it fills me with some sadness to think that there will be no more new films forthcoming from him. Among those directors who have passed during my adult lifetime, only the loss of Altman pains me more.
Between 1966 and his untimely death at age 54 in 1996, Kieslowski directed over three dozen films, mostly documentary and primarily short subject, many of these being made for Polish television. I have seen the feature films from the tail end of his career: The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colors trilogy - Blue, White, and Red. The latter films were each named after one of the colors on the French flag and took as their central themes the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity. (On a side note: Kieslowski had threatened retirement after finishing Red. If time has taught us anything, from Ingmar Bergman to the Eagles, from The Who to James Cagney, it's to never believe someone who says they have retired. At the time of his death, he had script treatments for a proposed new series of three films entitled Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, respectively. These have each been made into films this past decade by different directors. Only the first, Tom Tykwer's take on Heaven - from 2002, and starring Cate Blanchett - is well known to me.)
I have also watched his monumental ten-part television series The Decalogue, inspired by the Ten Commandments, as well as the original full-length versions of two of those ten installments: A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing. I hope to someday focus on that series as well and its second installment "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." That should/could prove to be quite the potential rabble-rouser of a column in 2010. I won't go into much referencing of The Decalogue at this point in time, except to note that I find it successful for many of the same reasons that make the Three Colors films so powerful. More on those in a moment.
This is my first Chapter Two to focus on a film that serves as less of a sequel and more of a thematic companion to its predecessor and antecedents. I consider this the final puzzle piece in my crazy-quilt definition of the boundaries of this column while acknowledging that in some cases (in this case?), these columns may be explicitly harder for me to write, and perhaps for the reader to bear with. I have always maintained that the act of a story being told is often as not more interesting to me than the story being told, which may explain my love of tangents and breathless asides as much as anything else can. To put it another way with a cinematic bent - it's not what the film is about, but how it's about what it's about. There may be a small number of "plots" that writers have to work with, but I think the ways in which these stories can be constructed are limitless.
With impromptu or unofficial movie series, those that may only be appreciated or observed with the passage of time (or if a director says, "Hey, these films are connected!"), it becomes more a matter of considering the Chapter Two in and of itself and not worrying about comparing it favorably or otherwise to the first film or later films. Some of these that may occur in future columns then could be: Antoine et Collette (the second installment in Truffaut's "Adventures of Antoine Doinel" series_); William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (the second film in Baz Luhrmann's "Red Curtain" trilogy); Flirting, (John Duigan's follow-up to his coming-of-age tale The Year My Voice Broke); Barcelona (Whit Stillman's second foray into young 1980s upper-crusters on the social make); For A Few Dollars More (Leone's second film in his "Dollars" trilogy); Brazil (part two of Terry Gilliam's self-proclaimed "Imagination" trilogy), and so on. Perhaps I may even have to create my own observed series if there is ever a film I want to review but couldn't do otherwise? No, no that would fall strictly under the BOP Abuse of Power Act of 2005. Oh, well...
To come back to the film at hand, White is certainly the trickiest of the Three Colors trilogy to review, because it is seemingly the least forward, certainly nothing at all like what the DVD front photo of a smiling, half-naked, vaguely alien-looking Julie Delpy might suggest. Blue is marked by Juliette Binoche's effectively muted lead performance and a devastating car accident that sets the plot in motion. Red is a rapturous tale of paths not taken and choices undone, redemption and almost-love and secured Best Director and Best Original Screenplay nominations for its auteur. The closing minutes of Red bring the series full circle and although you don't have to see all three to feel at least some measure of Kieslowski's emotional gambit, it means more if you have. Red was also the most commercially successful, making more itself than the combined domestic grosses of Blue and White.
And White? White is, well, it is certainly the most "inconspicuous" of the bunch, mirroring one character's apt description of the protagonist Karol Karol (wide-eyed sad sack/everyman Zbigniew Zamachowski). If white as a color seems to be marked by an absence or a lack of (as Richard Dyer argued in his ridiculously engaging book on the subject and history of white-ness) then Karol is a fitting creation. He is an outsider, a Pole in France married to a French woman. He begins the film broke, humiliated in legal proceedings - his wife Dominique, played by Delpy, is granted a divorce because he has been unable to consummate the marriage - and ultimately homeless. Hell, a pigeon even craps on him outside the courthouse. Later, he makes his way back to Poland inside his suitcase (his passport having been revoked) only to become the victim of a would-be robbery by some larcenous airport employees. Miffed that he (and not booty) weighs down the luggage, they beat him up and toss him aside out in a snowy field. But, Karol is alive and at least, at last, he is back in his home country!
Kieslowski views these proceedings as he views them in all of his films, with a detached and unsentimental eye, yes, but with considerable love and compassion for his characters. Kieslowski is able to consider how chance and coincidence are really just the buzzwords for a shallower contemplation of how we are all connected in ways large and small, seen and unseen. The "chain of coincidence" dramas such as Babel that struggle to make this argument on increasingly larger (global) and more frenzied palettes end up missing the point, I think. They may be more existential about the "meaning of it all" but they end up less philosophical and certainly not more genuinely caring. For comparison, I feel that Richard Linklater is one of a few other film artists who shares this remarkable trait and although it may not be necessary for all writer/directors to communicate this kind of affection for their creations, what a world it might be if they did.
The visual style of White is also more subdued than the others in the trilogy. This may seem a given considering the color scheme here compared to the other two, but there are also a lot less visual encapsulations of the color, save for a quite funny flash of blinding white screen as one of the characters achieves orgasm. Kieslowski worked with a different cinematographer on each one and Edward Klosinski had his work cut out for him here. Aside from the shot just mentioned, there aren't many that explicitly call attention to themselves, which perhaps suggests just how well Klosinski succeeded at finding the right look for Karol's fall and rise and, fall again?
White is not only the funniest of the three but the most deadpan and the most acutely ironic. Karol finds the means to remake himself in the post-Communist Europe of the 1990s. He aligns himself with the "wrong crowd", proves himself to be a quick study and makes a name and some cash for himself. He finally has a way to achieve "equality" with Dominique but what he really wants is leverage and revenge and in the final minutes sets about the means of exacting this revenge. In the closing shot, he has gotten everything he wants and the answer he wants at precisely the moment he realizes he has taken it all away through a plot of his own making. The tears he cries are certainly tears of sorrow but might they not also be mixed with incredulous laughter? It also occurred to me just now that he might be considering himself as the butt of an off-color joke: "Hey didja hear the one about the man of Polish origin who . . ." But Kieslowski the humanist isn't passing any easy judgments or making cheap condescensions, just observing and recording
I noted at the beginning that what Kieslowski achieves with White, or with any of his films built around ideas such as commandments or national mottos, is doubly accomplished. This is because he never sacrifices the plot and narrative to the larger themes he wishes to explore, but finds a way to let them emerge of their own accord through the world he has created and the collaborators he has surrounded himself with. The stories in the Three Colors films (all conceived with co-scenarist Krzysztof Piesiewicz) overflow with twists and unexpected corrections. If it were as simple as noting the ways in which White explores the notion of equality, well that might be fun for film majors to dissect, but it would suggest a terribly earnest, frankly boring, film. Thankfully, that is not what Kieslowski set out to achieve. White, and the others, feel as vibrant, alive, and moving, a decade and a half later, as they did in the 1990s.