Three Colors: White

1994 middle part of a trilogy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A spiteful guy tries to get even with his mean ex-wife.

This very nearly starts with a "What are those?" shoe gag a couple of decades before that became a popular meme.

This second film is different in a lot of ways to the other two in Kieslowski's trilogy. First, it's got a male protagonist despite what every single poster for the movie would have you believe. Julie Delpy's character is important in a sort of antagonistic way, but she is not the main character. It's Zbigniew Zamachowski's Polish immigrant Karol Karol who is the protagonist of this one. He's a great character, too. He's a complete dupe contrasted to Delpy's Dominique. While Karol Karol--a guy so nice, Kieslowski named him twice--is having pigeons shit on him or cradling toilets, Dominique is cruelly setting fire to her own salon or sharing her orgasmic joys over the phone with her ex-husband.

Second, the tone is much different. This doesn't have the same poetic quality of Blue or Red. And it's a comedy, although it's a very dark one. It's not that there aren't some great shots in this because there are. I especially liked one that shows Delpy's hair moving with her sleeping breaths. But this is much more of a traditional narrative than the other two. It's also got more of an Eastern European feel than its bookends, both which feel very French to me. That probably has a lot to do with who the main character is and where a lot of the action of the film takes place, but I think it also has to do with the pacing of the story.

Like the others, this is a warped look at a single theme. This time, it's equality, but it's a rather cynical look at what that means, at least in the context of a relationship between a man and a woman. And like the others, it's got a lot of shots featuring at least one item of the titular color, a scene in which an elderly person struggles to recycle a bottle, and a final shot that shows a character smiling and crying simultaneously.

While watching this, I was inspired to make a kazoo out of a comb and play it for money on the streets of Indianapolis. In just under five hours, I got two dollars and sixty-five cents, two cigarette butts, and a condom that was out of its wrapper.