** WHITE
With Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delphy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr, Grzegorz Warchol, and Jerzy Nowak.
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Kieslowski’s Red, the crowning work of his “Three Colors” trilogy, met with a very different public response. As far as the international press was concerned, it was the popular favorite. Considering that Kieslowski had already won prizes for Blue and White at Venice and Berlin in the past year and had announced his retirement from directing at Berlin, some people were primed for a triple crown, even if more savvy forecasters were noting that at a festival dominated by the U.S. and France, where Kieslowski is something less than a universal role model–having alienated both the New York Times and Cahiers du Cinema with the mystical vagaries of Blue–the odds of pulling off such a feat were fairly remote. So when the jury headed by Clint Eastwood opted to ignore Red entirely and bestow its top prize on Pulp Fiction, the message being sent out was that irresponsible entertainment was clearly favored over thoughtful art-house fare. Given the atmosphere of the festival as a whole–closer to that of a business convention than of a cultural event–this was hardly surprising.
It may be, as Rayns points out, “as sensitive to silence as to speech, and alert to the kind of meanings we prefer to hide away.” It may be that all its “imaginative and creative efforts have gone into understanding the way we are,” but if they have, not much has been understood. And far from being “free from ‘humanist’ lies and sentimental evasions,” White depends on just such lies and evasions to arrive at the limited understanding it does have.
Still hopelessly smitten with Dominique in spite of her contempt for him, he phones her yet again, and she asks him to hold the phone while she proceeds to have an orgasm with a lover, moaning audibly. By this time Karol has met a fellow Pole named Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), who quickly befriends him; they concoct a ruse to smuggle Karol back into Poland inside his own trunk. Needless to say, the trunk is stolen in customs and opened in a desolate Warsaw wasteland by a band of Polish thieves, who are so irate that Karol’s carrying only a two-franc coin and a Russian watch that they beat him up. Nevertheless, though surrounded by heaps of garbage, he’s clearly glad to be home.
