MOVIE PLOT SUMMARY. _________________________________________________________________ Three Colors: White (1994) This is the second of the "Three Colors" trilogy "Red" "White" and "Blue"; the colors symbolizing liberty, equality and fraternity. White, therefore, was written around the destructive dynamics of a relationship based upon great inequality. Karol is a Polish hairdresser working in France. He has a beautiful wife, Dominique, who he loves to obsession, and who is in the process of divorcing him for his inability to "consummate the marriage". Karol looses all of his earthly possessions and is literally driven out of France by his estranged wife. The remainder of the movie has Karol fight- ing to resolve his deep passion for Dominique with his own helplessness. French and Polish with English subtitles. Summary written by: Tilo Reber {treber@page.mmc.com} Karol (Polish) marries Domininque (French) and moves to Paris. The marriage breaks down and Dominique divorces Karol, forcing him into the life of a metro beggar and eventually back to Poland. However he never forgets Dominique and while building a new life for himself in Warsaw he begins to plot... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ eye WEEKLY June 16 1994 Toronto's arts newspaper ...free every Thursday ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Subject: PREVIEW PREVIEW :Subject WHITE Starring Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos and Jerzy Stuhr. Screenplay by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. (STC) Opens June 17. IT'S ZBIGNIEW ZAMACHOWSKI! THE STAR OF KIESLOWSKI'S WHITE, THAT'S WHO by DENIS SEGUIN Zbigniew Zamachowski is a popular actor in his native Poland. But not too famous, he says through a translator: "I'm not recognized from behind." The star of White, the second film in his countryman Krzysztof Kieslowski's acclaimed Three Colors Trilogy, Zamachowski is still wondering how he got the part. "I look like another famous Polish actor," he says, implying that perhaps the director confused the two. He further suggests that Kieslowski, recognizing the error, cast the double as Zamachowski's brother in White. "It's the second time we've played brothers," he says. Zamachowski is just off the plane from the Seattle Film Festival, and the publicist wonders if we could stop talking and order our dinner. As Kieslowski's Decalogue took the Ten Commandments as its foundation, so the Three Colors Trilogy takes its theme from the motto underlying the French tri-color flag: blue, white and red representing liberty, equality and fraternity. And as the Decalogue examined how human nature confounds the Commandments, the films Blue, White and Red are not soul-soothing treatises on the Rights of Man but, at times, harrowing, sometimes hilarious commentaries on the dream of our potential and the nightmare of our reality. Hence, while White's subtitle is "equality," its story is about the absence of genuine equality, and its moral is that such an absence is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially when inequality makes for such richly black comedy as it does in White. Zamachowski plays Karol Karol, a Polish hairdresser married to Dominique, a French woman (played by the lunar beauty Julie Delpy). When we meet him, he is heading to the civil courts, where his wife is waiting to divorce him. The grounds: sexual abandonment -- Karol can't get it up. She takes him for everything and when he makes one final effort to regain her love, she sets him up for arson. Karol, with two francs in his pocket, sits forlorn in the Metro, busking with comb and paper. A fellow Pole happens by and immediately recognizing the tragic Polish melody -- "Many people have killed themselves listening to this song," says the translator -- offers Karol his assistance in returning to the motherland. This is the classic Kieslowski moment: his films are minefields of coincidence and eventually one mine goes off. Our waiter arrives and it transpires that he too is Polish. Zamachowski and the translator are delighted. The publicist and I smile in our incomprehension. "His name is Roman," says the translator. "Like Polanski," says Zamachowski, referring to another notable Pole. Then he continues in Polish, "Kieslowski may as well have directed this." He shrugs and looks heavenwards. "Krzysztof?" he calls, "are you here?" I ask if there is any significance in his character's double name. "Kieslowski's fascination with Charlie Chaplin," he replies. It seems that Karol is Polish for Charlie. "Obviously, he was not asking me to imitate him but only to see Chaplin's technique as grounding for the role. Kieslowski was always reminding me that an actor has to be half tragic and half comic." Reduced to tramp status, the unprepossessing Karol is subjected to numerous indignities. Without his passport, he cannot cross the border so he travels as his Polish savior's checked luggage. Of course, the suitcase goes missing. The Warsaw thieves who have stolen it carry it to a remote location to pry it open. They aren't pleased with their discovery -- Karol gets beaten to a pulp. Gradually and then all at once Karol turns his life around. Having been chewed up and spat out by the French system, he applies himself to the system of the New Poland, a world of graft, corruption and black markets in which everything -- Israeli guns and Russian corpses -- is available for a price. Of course, once Karol has found his equilibrium, he wants to tilt the balance further in his favor. He wants his revenge on Dominique and he's willing to die to get it. Like Karol, Zamachowski at once enjoys and is appalled by the changes in his country. He's making a new movie about three Poles who get entangled with the Russian Mafia, the latest problem to beset Warsaw. The difference between past and present, he says, "is that now we can make movies that are pure art, completely separate from politics. During communism, you had to justify your film's existence." At 32, Zamachowski's old enough to remember the old days, and young enough to adapt to the new. As for the Solidarity uprising, "At the time, it was exciting but I'd never want to go through it again. You can only go through such a thing once." KIESLOWSKI'S "WHITE": RESCUE FROM THE LANDFILL OF LIFE Bill Morrison News and Observer Staff Writer The Polish trilogy that began with "Blue" continues with "White," a black Chaplinesque comedy about a worm named Karol who turns. Karol is an adorable little fellow, a Polish hairdresser from Warsaw, who ends up in Paris with Dominique, the woman of his dreams. But after six months of marriage, she divorces him, humiliating him before the court when she says, quite rightly, that he has never consummated their marriage. He ends up losing everything -- passport, money, beauty salon, dignity and the love of his life. He just wants to curl up and dye. Like Chaplin's disheveled Tramp, the crestfallen Karol is left alone without love or joy. He settles at the metro stop nearest the apartment that he once shared with his wife -- he can watch her shadow on the curtain as she prepares to make love to a male visitor). Karol plays mournful Polish ballads on a comb for pocket change. The music attracts a sad-faced Pole named Mikolaj, who shares his bottle with Karol. In their cups, they share secrets. Mikolaj knows a man in Warsaw who wants to arrange a murder -- his own. He will pay handsomely. Karol may be interested. To get Karol back to Poland, Mikolaj smuggles him across the border in a trunk. Because life does not run smoothly for Karol, the trunk is stolen at the airport and a frantic Mikolaj must report the lost luggage to customs. What is in the trunk, asks the airport official. Well, Mikolaj says, to tell the truth his friend is in it. Cut to a city dump where thieves break into stolen luggage, spilling Karol on the snow-covered ground. This could be the ending for a Chaplin two-reeler, but it's only the beginning for this tidy little revenge comedy. Karol not only makes a fortune but wins back his own self-respect. There's a joyous reunion in Warsaw with Mikolaj, the men gamboling on the frozen river like children at play. Director Krzysztof Kieslowski launched his series with "Blue," a dark, slow, heartbreaking film about loss. Juliette Binoche played a woman who survives the car accident that kills her composer-husband and their daughter. She wants to end her life, but life is not done with her yet. Binoche suggested a soul in torment, a dark lady of the sonnets. Zbigniew Zamachowski is more humorous but no less sad. He truly is Chaplinesque -- that's what Kieslowski wanted. Karol in Polish means Charlie. And when he cast the role he gave Zamachowski two words of direction: "Charlie Chaplin." Kieslowski wanted the same blend of pathos and humor, not an imitation. And he was not disappointed. Zamachowski looks more like Dustin Hoffman or Henry Gibson than Charles Chaplin, but he has a lovely, expressive face, silly and sad one moment, dark even sinister the next. Janusz Gajos gives a perfectly lovely deadpan performance as Mikolaj. Julie Delpy, as Dominique, has the look of a Hollywood blonde of the '40s -- or an angel. She's a fascinating creature, slinking about like a feline. Kieslowski says she's a bit like a crazy cat, and that's the way Delpy plays her. Dominique appeared for a fleeting moment in "Blue," sitting on a courtroom bench waiting for her divorce hearing. Juliette Binoche is seen peeking into the same courtroom as "White" begins. The first two films also show a very old and crippled woman struggling to deposit a wine bottle in a trash receptacle (such a little thing, yet a link between the two). And "Red," the last film in the trilogy, will bring them all together on a ship bound for England. I can't wait. BY EDWIN JAHIEL WHITE *** 1/2 Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Producer, Marin Karmitz. Written by Krzysztof Piesiewicz & Kieslowski. Photography, Edward Klosinski. Editing, Urszula Lesiak. Music, Zbigniew Preisner. Set design, Halina Dobrawolska, Claude Lenoir. Interior sets, Madgalena Dipont. Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr. A French-Swiss-Polish production released by Miramax. In French and Polish with subtitles. 89 minutes. Rated R (un-graphic sex and mild violence). Polish writer-director Krzysztof Kieslowski started out with documentaries that were a strong amalgam of social reality and political and psychological analysis. The experience was later transmuted into complex fiction films before and after the Solidarity period. Although admired by connoisseurs, he reached world-class status and a larger public only with "A Short Film About Love" and "A Short Film About Killing" and the Franco-Polish "The Double Life of Veronique." The "Short Films" were features expanded from two even shorter ones in the "Decalogue 2" (the Ten Commandments) set of 10 one-hour TV films. Then came Kieslowki's meeting with Marin Karmitz. A wartime Jewish-Rumanian refugee in France, Karmitz is a filmmaker who, turning major exhibitor and producer, became kind of patron of quality, often non-mainstream pictures and directors. The meeting resulted his MK2 company producing Kieslowski's "Three Colors" trilogy. "Three Colors: White," shortened and/or imported as "White," is the middle panel. Although subtly interconnected, the films have each their own independent life. There is absolutely no necessity to have seen one in order to make sense of the others, just as there is not any for John Ford's so-called Cavalry trilogy of westerns. In "Blue," "White," and "Red," each title corresponds to one of the colors of the French Republic's flag and to the symbolism of that color : Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Even so, there is no need either to take literally the application of those ideals to each film. Kieslowski, a thinking person's filmmaker and one of the rare philosophers and sociologists of the screen, can be aesthetic, realistic, devious, straightforward, complex, simple, symbolic or literal -- all in the same film. In "Blue," the widow of a composer goes to extremes of solitude trying to reach unachievable independence. In "Red" a young model attains an odd friendship with a strange, old, retired judge."White" is by far the lightest in tone and most accessible of the three movies. "White"'s Karol (Zamachowski) is a prize-winning Warsaw hairdresser who, love-struck by a French woman (Delpy) moves to Paris. She soon divorces him and treats him shabbily. Now a penniless bum, Karol returns to chaotic post-Socialist Poland, where -- in an illustration of "equality" -- this "clod" ( a quote) shows that he can outmaneuver others and become their equal, as well as his former wife's. There's something Orwellian about Karol as he shows that some people are more equal than others. The lines above are vague on purpose, as the film is a constant state of flux, of twisting and turning, of surprising the movie's characters as well as its audiences. It uses several metaphors and symbols (with a light hand) and it is also full of ironical glances at contemporary, neo-capitalistic Poland, where everythng can be bought or sold. Karol's full name is Karol Karol (Charlie Charlie). Actor Zamachowski was simply instructed by his director with two words: Charlie Chaplin -- Chaplin that is, as an inspiration rather than for imitation. Indeed Karol is a Chaplinesque figure, the tragicomic little man against the big world, the simplistic-looking hero who is anything but simple, the victim who take knocks and learns how to kick back (including kickbacks in messy Poland). He is played to perfection as the "inconspicuous" (another quote) fellow who, in a picaresque-like way, rises to great visibility. Remarkable too is Janusz Gajos, the impassive, nice man who helps Karol to get back to Poland and becomes his partner after a splendid episode of existential angst. And the well-known Jerzy Stuhr, is physically and temperamentally an uncannily good choice for Karol's brother. Most of "White" is shot in Poland, a sad, gray land of black-markets and nouveau-riche entrepreneurs, where nothing works but everything can be made to work. Even the colors of the images are muted, oppressive, murky -- with, here and there, bits of symbolic white. . Cleverly, the film shows glimpses of the contrasting wealth and luxury of France, but only fleetingly. Not only does it not make any marked comparisons to shabby Poland but it has its own depressing aspects of Paris. "White" is a black comedy, a thriller, a movie of scams and entrapments, and a piece of social criticism all rolled into one intelligent, ambiguous and most entertaining whole.