Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Polish immigrant Karol Karol finds himself out of a marriage, a job and a country when his French wife, Dominique, divorces him after six months due to his impotence. Forced to leave France after losing the business they jointly owned, Karol enlists fellow Polish expatriate Mikołaj to smuggle him back to their homeland.
The middle entry in Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy is a darkly comic, tonally unique exploration of equality filtered through a bittersweet revenge narrative. The cinematography, with its muted white-and-grey palette, is beautifully distinctive. Novelty is high — Kieślowski's ironic take on 'equality' via a humiliated immigrant's tragicomic rise is singular in voice and execution. The ending is one of the trilogy's most haunting and ambiguous moments. Plot and acting, while strong, are slightly more conventional within the arthouse tradition, keeping this from an impossible sweep of fours.