1993 drama, dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie
Delpy; IMDb /
allmovie. After his wife
divorces him and takes everything, Karol hits rock bottom and then
returns to Poland.
Ebert described this as an anti-comedy, but to me it feels more
like an anti-caper: there's all this stuff happening, careful plots
and setups with non-obvious goals, but the ultimate objective is not
for cool criminals to steal money from a bad person; if anything, it's
the opposite. And there's never a sense of fun.
All the things go wrong for Karol, but… why should I care about him
more than about anyone else? How did he and Dominique meet and marry
in the first place? Why is she now acting like a turbo bitch? Do the
two middle-aged Polish men writing the script simply assume that I
will sympathise with a middle-aged Polish man? I think they do,
because they push "poor Karol's life is terrible" much more than "but
he's a good guy and doesn't deserve it". He really isn't a good guy,
and Dominique is an arbitrary motivation for him to go and do things.
If this were a caper film, if we saw them doing stuff to each other
as a weird sort of relationship game, it might work better, but in the
end I couldn't find much to enjoy here. The visual inspiration of
Blue is almost absent from this one.
I talk about this film further on Ribbon of
Memes.