Three Colours: White

Nearly everything I know about Eastern European culture is based on what I read and watch. I’ve made one very brief trip to Warsaw that, to be honest, felt a lot like modern day Chicago to me, so I can’t extrapolate much of anything from it. But this

Karol is still holding onto that 2 franc piece, but as this segment opens, he is down by the river at night and contemplating tossing it in — perhaps a final goodbye to the French adventure that turned out so badly for him. But he can’t bring himself to throw

Kieslowski decided not to show us what Karol needed to steal before his flight back to Warsaw. It’s a plaster sculpture of a woman who bears some resemblance to Dominique that he saw in a store window. We don’t immediately know where Karol is as we watch an

This is a good time in the story to introduce my theory of “Three Colours: White” — actually, two different theories. The first is that, while Kieslowski officially calls Blue, White, Red a trilogy, there is a single moral universe that binds The Dekalog, The Double Life of Veronique and the

As I understand the Yiddish terms, a Schlemiel is a bumbler, someone who creates his own bad luck, while a Schlimazel is someone who has bad luck dumped upon him regularly (perhaps by the Schlemiel.) In this scene, Karol reveals himself as a Schlemiel. Instead of taking the visual evidence

We get a brief respite from the brutality inflicted on Karol Karol in an unlikely location — the Paris Metro underground. Karol has taken the comb, symbol of his profession, and turned it into a crude musical instrument akin to a kazoo. He’s trying to busk for some quick cash