Three Colors: White

Three Colors: White (Trois couleurs: Blanc, 1994) — watch online the second chapter of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy on iFILM. A Polish-French-Swiss co-production, it stars Zbigniew Zamachowski and Julie Delpy, and sits somewhere between a deadpan comedy and a carefully plotted revenge film.

Karol Karol traveled from Warsaw to Paris to get married. Six months later his French wife Dominique divorces him in open court — citing impotence — and he ends up on the street with nothing: no money, no work permit, no way home. A fellow Polish expat agrees to smuggle him back to Warsaw inside a suitcase. The landing is rougher than expected. Back on home soil, Karol discovers that post-communist Poland suits his particular talent for improvisation rather better than France ever did.

White is the most playful film in the trilogy, but Kieślowski does not let the comedy off easily. The title signals equality — the third ideal of the French republic — and the whole story is an anatomy of how unequal two people in a relationship can be, and what one of them is prepared to do about it. Watch Three Colors: White (1994) online on iFILM.