Three Colors: White
After opening with a brief, seemingly irrelevant scene of a suitcase on an airport carousel, the story quickly focuses on a Paris divorce court where Polish immigrant Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is pleading with the judge (the same legal proceedings that Juliette Binoche's character Julie briefly stumbled upon in the previous film 'Blue'). Despite his difficulty in understanding French, Karol is made to understand that his French wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) does not love him. The grounds for divorce are humiliating: Karol was unable to consummate the marriage. Along with his wife, he loses his means of support (a beauty salon they jointly owned), his legal residency in France, and the rest of his cash in a series of mishaps, and is soon a beggar living on the streets. He only retains a 2-franc coin that he got as change from the phone while trying to speak with his now ex-wife. In a Paris Métro station, performing songs for spare change, Karol meets and is befriended by another Pole, Mikoaj (Janusz Gajos). While Karol has lost his wife and his property, Mikoaj is married and successful, he offers Karol a job consisting of killing someone who wants to be dead but does not have enough courage to do it himself. Through a hazardous scheme, Mikoaj helps him return to Poland hidden in the suitcase shown at the beginning of the film, which is later stolen by employees at the airport. The airport thieves, eager to find something valuable inside their stolen trunk, are angry when they open it and they find Karol inside. The thieves beat up Karol and leave him behind in a nearby garbage dump. Despite his mishap, Karol returns to working as a hairdresser with his brother (Jerzy Stuhr) whom he now moves in with. After a while, Karol, no longer content to working at his brother's salon, quits his job and sets up to make himself a pot of cash in newly capitalist Poland. Karol takes another job as as a bodyguard in a seemingly innocent cash exchange office. Mikoaj meets Karol in a Warsaw Metro tunnel for the execution of the "suicide", it turns out to be that Mikoaj is the intended victim and asks Karol to kill him. Karol shoots a blank into Mikoaj's chest and asks him if he really wants to go through with it as the next bullet is real. Mikoaj refuses and is able to feel alive again. Using his position as a deceptively foolish bodyguard, Karol spies on his bosses and discovers their scheme to purchase different pieces of land that they knew were going to be targeted by big companies for development and resell for large profits. Karol beats them to it, and then tells his ex-bosses that if they kill him all his estate shall go to the Catholic Church, and they are therefore forced to purchase all the land from him. With the money he gained from this scheme and with the payment from Mikoaj, the two go into business (of a vaguely defined but possibly illegal nature) together. Karol becomes ruthlessly ambitious, focusing his energies on money-making schemes while learning to speak French and brooding over his wife's abandonment. He uses his new financial influence in a world where, as several characters observe, "you can buy anything" to execute a complex scheme to first win back Dominique, and then destroy her life. Karol takes his revenge against his ex-wife by faking his own death after which she shows up for his funeral. Karol then sneaks into her hotel room and has sex with her to prove his potency again. Then afterwords, Dominique is arrested and imprisoned for his 'murder'. The final image of the film shows Karol secretly visiting his wife in prison and staring at Dominique through the window of her prison cell. Karol then suddenly feels ashamed at himself for this revenge plot against his wife and openly cries... realizing that he must finally let go of her in order to move on with his own life.
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