Word: polished
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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...
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...
...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...
...comment might have been taken as a clue. Friends who knew Simpson well understood that he was a creature of careful intention, the natural ease a measure of his discipline. He did not so much change, from the days of his raw, painful childhood, as add layers, coats of polish that only occasionally peeled. One day he was making a television commercial in Oakland, California, and fell into his first language, the street-corner argot of his gang years. Furious with himself, he stopped the shooting, regrouped and then said he wanted to do it again. The second try went...
FOLLOWING KRISTALLNACHT IN 1939, when Nazi mobs in Berlin destroyed synagogues and shops owned by Jews, a small window to freedom briefly opened for German, Austrian and Polish children. Over the course of eight months, nearly 10,000 Jewish youngsters under 18 were evacuated to Britain to stay with foster families until it was safe to return. Most never saw their parents or homeland again. While the Kindertransport saved them, the separation from everything they had cared for would be a kind of death...