Three Colors: White (1994)

Krzysztof Kieślowski's second entry in his Three Colours trilogy arrives draped in the French Revolutionary ideal of equality, though the equality on offer here is the ledger-settling kind, tallied in grievances and repaid with interest. Karol Karol, a Polish barber, is divorced by his French wife for his inability to perform, stripped of salon, passport and savings, and reduced to comb-and-paper harmonica work in the Métro. He smuggles himself home in a suitcase, builds a fortune, and engineers an elaborate revenge that ends with Dominique behind bars. It is a comedy, apparently. The tone sits somewhere between a shrug and a knife.

The film's treatment of its central marriage is where contemporary sensibilities would find the least purchase. Dominique exists as an object of obsession and a mechanism of humiliation, a femme fatale whose interior life is never granted a scene of its own. Kieślowski famously reshot her final moment to make her seem less monstrous, which is a curious instinct for a story that otherwise uses her as a target. Anyone hunting for a feminist reading will be hunting for some time. The film simply is not interested in that conversation, and it does not pretend otherwise.

A mild satirical edge targets the scramble of post-communist commerce, where Karol watches his employers hoard land for speculative resale and then beats them at their own game. It is a glancing joke, not a thesis, and it passes quickly. The casting is a natural Franco-Polish arrangement, drawn from the story's geography and nothing else. Kieślowski is an ironist by temperament, and he dramatizes his themes obliquely, refusing to lecture. The whole enterprise is cool, precise, and largely indifferent to the cultural preoccupations that would arrive decades later.