Three Colors: White

The comic counterpoint to Blue’s tragedy and Red’s romance, Three Colors: White (for “equality”) also marks Kieślowski’s cinematic return to his native Poland. Poor Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is a battered and bruised Pole busy being humiliated in radiant Paris; his glamorous French wife (Julie Delpy) is divorcing him on grounds of impotence, and he’s about to wind up homeless. Returning to Poland in a less than graceful manner (“Home at last,” he remarks after being beaten up on a trash heap), Karol swears vengeance on his wife, and, thanks to a few mob connections, embarks on gaining the only equality that she—and the French—will understand: economic. Easily the liveliest (and most pessimistic) section of the trilogy, White is powered by the comic force of Zamachowski and, as his hairdressing brother, Jerzy Stuhr, and by the entertainingly satirical insights into the gulf between Eastern and Western Europe that Kieślowski brings.