A Polish Joke Played on France

By RICHARD CORLISS

Love, the movies tell us, is a grand spur to acheivement. But so is hatred. Give a fellow a good grudge and a thirst for revenge, and he will find his wits sharpened, his energy focused, his ambition liberated from the timid bonds of morality. On this kind of obsession, companies have been built and countries destroyed. It's surely a strong enough motivation for one devilishly clever Polish movie: Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: White.

Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) and Dominique (Julie Delpy) are hairdressers. She's French and gorgeous; he's Polish and not. They marry; he moves to Paris to be with her; they open a salon. But suddenly he is impotent, and Dominique sues for divorce. When Karol tries to reconcile, she sets their salon on fire and tells the police he did it. He is reduced to begging in the Metro. Could life get worse? Oh, yes. As Karol watches her bedroom from the street, Dominique makes adulterous love and, when he calls, moans her infidelity into the phone. Before he can hang up, the phone company steals his last two francs. Karol tucks himself into his only suitcase and escapes France as airplane luggage. On arrival in Warsaw, his case is swiped by thieves who beat Karol when they find him inside. "Home at last," he murmurs.

Home is a former Soviet satellite in its convulsive lurch toward capitalism. Anything is possible for a man with a dream and no scruples about realizing it. Karol plunges into the black market, into real estate and international finance; he comes this close to murder. And all in an elaborate scheme to lure Dominique to Poland for some sweet, fatal revenge.

White is the second episode in Kieslowski's Blue-White-Red trilogy analyzing liberty, equality and fraternity in modern Europe -- but never mind, the film works fine on its own. The director, who earned world-class status in the mid-'80s with The Decalogue (a 10-part Polish TV series of modern fables, each illustrating one of the Commandments), is in an impish mood here. He finds hairpin turns and deadpan delight in the sexual and political intrigue devised by screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz. And Zamachowski, who has some of Dustin Hoffman's molelike ingenuity, plays Karol Karol (Charlie Charlie in Polish) as a Chaplin figure hatching a Kafka plot.

At its heart, White is a Polish joke played on the French. For Kieslowski it can be seen as a declaration of both love and disdain for a foreign country and a language in which he works but which he does not quite understand. In White Karol could be Kieslowski: resourceful, isolated, powerless, homesick. And Dominique could be France: beautiful, haughty, unforgiving, irresistible. "After all she did," Karol says, "I still love her."

At the end, Karol still feels that way. Despite the betrayals it depicts, White is no essay in misogyny. It ends on a note of profound poignancy: two people gazing at each other through the prison bars of their impossible, inescapable love.