More hope than equality in Kieslowski's "White".
More Hope Than Equality in Kieslowski's "White"
Simona J. Sivkoff
SLAV 307
Dr. P. PETRO
UBC
Paris, a distressed man is entering the judicial palace, he is insecure, scared, and does not speak French. This is the first impression of the main character, the Pole--Karol Karol, whose beautiful French wife Dominique has summoned him to the court, so that she is granted a divorce due to his inability to consummate their marriage. She is determined to be happy and fulfilled, she is after all this incredibly beautiful and seductive French woman, who married Karol the Polish hairdresser, and now expects him to fully satisfy her. Dominique's coldness is striking with its inhumanity towards the pity invoking Karol, she cannot wait for him to get used to Paris, to learn French, to integrate and therefore she is divorcing him. The flashback to a white wedding ceremony is interrupting the more and more humiliating scene of Dominique throwing out Karol on the street. The hope of happiness and love associated with their new life together is cut off abruptly and decisively in a court room. This is the opening of the second film of Kieslowski's trilogy "Blue", "White" and "Red".
"White" deals with the lives of a man from entering capitalism post-communist Poland and a woman from France--one of the most important countries in Western Europe. The film reveals through the personal relations of this dysfunctional family the complex power struggle of domination of Western Europe over Eastern Europe, of man over woman and of love over money. Kieslowski's protagonist Karol Karol strives to reach the transcendental dimension of love, but his cold and apathetic wife needs solely the sexual fulfilment of his marital duties, love is for her best achieved through orgasm. The apparent impotence of Karol while in Paris could also be interpreted as the cruel and demanding way in which the Western Europe is asking Eastern Europe to perform, at any time and with the best results. Therefore everything that cannot match the expected level of excellence is deemed "useless and should be thrown away". And Karol is thrown away. He does not perform as expected, logically he is not needed. Karol is alone with his big traveller's trunk, without friends, without money sitting in the Parisian subway station not even able to beg for some change in French. He is defeated, she has all the power over his existence, over his happiness, and she has crushed him in her home country, in her mother tongue, with taking away her beauty saloon. The mood that is implied is tragic, hopeless and nothing but sorrow and despair seeps through Karol's eyes.
Karol sits at the subway station opposite their home and plays on his comb where he meets another Pole- Mikolaj, who will help him to get back to Poland, where Karol will regain his self respect, learn to speak French and come back to Paris to humiliate in the same way his porcelain- doll-looking wife humiliated him. But before this comes true, he has to undergo one more trial on his aching soul-Karol has to hear Dominique making love with her new potent French lover, while he is phoning her. Kieslowski plays with the clichés about love, betrayal, ...
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Karol sits at the subway station opposite their home and plays on his comb where he meets another Pole- Mikolaj, who will help him to get back to Poland, where Karol will regain his self respect, learn to speak French and come back to Paris to humiliate in the same way his porcelain- doll-looking wife humiliated him. But before this comes true, he has to undergo one more trial on his aching soul-Karol has to hear Dominique making love with her new potent French lover, while he is phoning her. Kieslowski plays with the clichés about love, betrayal, revenge, satisfaction and fascinates the spectator with the unexpected humanism that is contained in the little, ordinary acts of the little and very ordinary people such as Karol, Mikolaj and Dominique. Kieslowski also gives the feeling that before these ordinary people are able to fulfil such great deeds they have to be put through very extraordinary trials of their faith in love and life.
Despair brings Karol and Mikolaj together, Karol is desperate after the loss of his hope for a happy life with the woman he loves and Mikolaj is desperate because he acknowledges his inability to find true meaning in his seemingly happy life-loving wife and kids, great memory assisting him in playing bridge. Mikolaj is looking for a killer, someone who will release, at this point still his anonymous friend, from the pain of his existence. Karol rejects the offer, all he wants is to get back immediately to his promised land Poland, where he could start working on his new self, the man worthy of Dominique's love and the man who would punish her for her cruelty to the speaking broken French Karol. Mikolaj helps Karol to get to Poland by smuggling him in the only belonging that Karol has left-his huge traveller's trunk. Karol survives the grotesque trip in the trunk, the beating by the disappointed thieves of his trunk and now he is lying on the hills of his home country covered in white snow , holding the bust of a porcelain beauty remarkably similar to his wife.
The journey to the creation of his new self has begun, a bit rougher than he expected, but this is Eastern Europe, things are not strictly regulated as in the West, and the margin for interpretation is usually much greater. Kieslowski shows through the pain and suffering of the average person-Karol- the true dimensions of love, friendship, family and power. Poland could be seen as an image summarizing the political, economic and social processes taking place as a whole throughout in Eastern Europe, and the hopes and expectations of the people there to be happy and fully integrated with the West always perceived till now as land of happiness and true realized dreams.
The murky economic formations that emerged in Eastern Europe gave rise to the new class of entrepreneurs, portrayed in the film by the foreign currency exchange office owner and his not very smart, but well-built friends. Even Karol's brother has entered Western Europe by putting a neon sign on their quite shabby eastern European hair saloon. Sorrow stricken Karol is back there and his brother dutifully nourishes him with hot broth and attentive care. Karol decides to find Mikolaj and tell him that he is willing to kill Mikolaj's friend, if the friend of course still wants it.
Karol is portrayed so far as the average, good man, who would rather be abused than be the one who abuses and Kieslowski is showing the spectators the straight face with which Karol pulls the trigger against his friend Mikolaj's heart and how Mikolaj's body in slow motion is shaken by the shot, destroys all trivial expectations and demonizes Karol. Kieslowski increases the spectators' dreadful feeling of realized inability to follow and predict the actions of the characters and shatters their trust in human goodness, but only for the split second of the duration of the shot, as the bullet is blank. Mikolaj is given a second chance to redefine his existence and Karol has not only not killed his friend but has given him this second chance.
Hope in the existence of true friendship is sealed with a bottle of vodka and playing on the huge, white ice rink, where the characters feel like children again. They are laughing happily and the feeling of hope is reinforced by the spacious covered with white snow ice rink. Hope that life can have fulfilling meaning, hope that people can stand above material limitations and hope in the emotions that make humans truly human-love, friendship, forgiveness. Now that Karol has enough money, earned by "fulfilling the contract to kill" his friend, he throws himself into the murky waters of fast money making mafia style. But Karol does not forget Mikolaj; on the contrary he makes him an indispensable part of his business and life. Karol is vigorously working on his new self- he is almost completed-his French is close to perfect and his monetary funds have dramatically increased, but Dominique still does not even want to hear his voice on the phone. Karol has never ceased loving Dominique, but he wants to see her suffer, wants to test her not- love towards him to the fullest. Karol decided to die, to bequeath his entire wealth to her and frame her for his murder. The film reveals very realistically the grotesque mentality that is starting to spread across Eastern Europe-money can buy one everything-even a Russian corpse for Karol's fake funeral. After the funeral Karol goes to Dominique's hotel room-- now his French is fluent, he is in his home country; he is rich and able to make love to her so outstandingly that her orgasm is accompanied with a white blackout.
She wakes up in the white sheets, she is ready to start over with him, there is so much hope for a happy life in her, but he is gone and instead there are police officers charging her with Karol's murder and taking her away to prison. Hope becomes as illusive as a dream and is vanished immediately in the revenge of the reality, the revenge that ordinary people want to see and taste, and the greatness of forgiveness remains a well kept territory for the superhuman spirit.
Karol has achieved his goal; he has created a new self that is capable of succeeding in society and in his private desires. Karol has punished Dominique for letting him down in such a stressful time for him in Paris and simultaneously has shown her his extreme love and devotion to her. Kieslowski portrays the ordinary man Karol as a human being touched by the great spirit of love and forgiveness, Karol is shown in a close up in the last scene bitterly crying while looking at behind the bars Dominique. She is miming that once she comes out of prison, they could get married and that she loves him too. There is hope in the white light sparkling from the wedding gown Dominique wears throughout the films' flashbacks; after all, nevertheless that Karol suffers now more than before the revenge.
Kieslowski through the unconventional twists of human fates reveals the ability of human beings to overcome the basic and socially constructed modes of behaviour. The director emphasizes that there is hope for people to be truly happy and fulfilled if they break away from the dynamics of domination. "White" is a powerful film critiquing the political, economical and emotional struggle for domination in human society, the film nevertheless underlines that nothing is inevitable and as long as people have hope and strive toward a better world they could attain it. In love and friendship all people are equal and are granted the hope for a new beginning, even when they come from a disintegrating Eastern Europe. In "White" the notion of hope is reinforced more dramatically then the mere notion of equality. "White" shows that once the dynamics of victim and oppressor is destroyed on a personal level, when humans realize that happiness is contained in the way they build their lives together without coercion but with mutual understanding and compromise, only then on a larger scale-the world- could there be hope to achieve this allusive dream of equality among different countries.
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