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	Film Review: White (Part 2 of Trois Colours)   (October 28, 2005) On October 8th I reviewed Blue, the first film of director Krzysztof Kieslowski's film trilogy Three Colors Trilogy (Blue / White / Red) ("Trois Colours" in its native France); the second part, White, is quite different but equally thought-provoking and artfully filmed. The three colors are inspired by the French flag and the high triad of values it represents: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Blue is said to express liberty, in the sense of Juliette Binoche freeing herself from grieving and loss. White is said to explore equality through the tortured emotions and power plays of a once-wed couple. The standard take on the movie is that it is an "ironic comedy," "a witty and sharp tragicomedy about revenge" or "a bleak comedy about inequality." Though I've seen the film before, I found no comedy to speak of but plentiful subtexts of love gone dark and the death and rebirth of one's identity. Interestingly, I have yet to find a review which pursues these themes. (If you haven't seen the film you might want to stop reading now, as I will discuss the ending.) The "equality" in a love relationship is explored on several levels in the film. The woman's name, Dominique, rather obviously introduces the theme of supremacy/dominance in a love match. This is reinforced in an early scene in which the woman (a waif-like Julie Delpy) throws her just-divorced husband out of his hair salon (now hers) after one last failed attempt at satisfactory sex. She says something along the lines of "I've won, I've won everything," by which she means the divorce and all his earthly posessions. There is also the firm suggestion that she's been dominant in bed, but without satisfaction. She also accuses Karol, her Polish ex-husband, of not understanding her love for him. You don't understand when I tell you I love you, or when I tell you I detest you, she exclaims in bitter exasperation. This introduces the dual nature of their bond--that the love each feels is capable of turning to rage, revenge and control--all the darker aspects of love which taste of obsession rather than true caring. Karol's friendship with a world-weary Pole injects another angle: that of death and identity. Without explanation, his new friend asks Karol to kill him. He eventually concurs, but with a twist: he first fires a blank shot, and then asks if his friend is still sure he wants to die. His friend changes his mind and decides to live. In a parallel fashion, Karol also decides to live. Rising from a real bottom (rejected by his wife, robbed and beaten, penniless except for a two-franc coin), he engineers a stunning turnaround by becoming a wealthy businessman-- and not always with entirely pure-white ethics. His motivation, we learn, is also not pure. He has built his fortune in order to entice his ex-wife to Poland. Toward this end, he wills his fortune to her and fakes his own death. After she has dutifully arrived for his funeral, he watches from a distance in a classic "watching your own funeral" shot, and witnesses her crying at his grave. Thus he learns that she does love him, and he appears in her hotel bed to finally satisfy her physically. His sexual potency is a not-too-subtle analogy of his emergence from being a dominated loser into a take-charge character. In a final twist, he manipulates his ex-wife into jail for supposedly murdering him; her protests that he is alive die in her throat, and we next see her behind the screened window of a prison. We learn that he was supposed to flee to Hong Kong to start a new life; instead, we see him enter the prison as a visitor, bearing gifts for his ex-wife. From the window, she makes a very ambiguous series of hand signs to him, including one which is unmistakably the act of sliding a wedding band on her third finger. As he watches her, tears roll down his cheeks. It is an artfully enigmatic ending. Are the tears of sadness for what he has done to her, or of victory that now he has exacted revenge, or of heartache for what both have lost? It seems to me that each person's love darkened in turn; for his inability to satisfy her sexually, she punished him most uncharitably; and when he realized he had truly lost her, then he baited her with a fortune and drove her first to bed and then to imprisonment. The prison, it seems, is not just walls around her; for he is imprisoned, too, by his continued ties to her. He cannot escape to Hong Kong and a new life; in that sense, his life is as forfeit as hers. His rebirth as a strong character has been wasted on punishing her, and now he too has nothing except his sad visits to the woman who once dominated him. Her emotions are equally enigmatic; is she signing that she still loves him? But who would trust the expressions of an wrongfully imprisoned woman? Is this the kind of love he has sought, that of dominance rather than caring? These are disturbing images and themes, for we see just this sort of violent struggle for control at play every day in domestic abuse. The film is a success in terms of being thought-provoking, but it has a contrived feel which detracts from the experience. How Karol convinced the Police to assume she murdered him is left unclear, as is her motivation for turning from a loving bride to a cruel witch. It seems that ultimately it is a movie constructed less around characters than around the interplay of powerful themes, and while that has its own rewards, it also has its own costs. * * * copyright © 2005 Charles Hugh Smith. All rights reserved in all media. I would be honored if you linked this wEssay to your site, or printed a copy for your own use. * * *
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