In losing his wife, a Polish expat is also stripped of his dignity. Shamed for his impotence before a divorce court, he’s summarily evicted from his Paris home, ousted from his post at a high-end hair salon, disassociated from his bank account and deprived of his passport. While living as a vagrant in a nearby subway station, fate introduces him to an amiable businessman who takes pity and finds a way to send him back to his motherland. There, he intends to set things right: pulling himself up by his bootstraps and seeking a twisted measure of revenge against the woman he holds responsible.

Roger Ebert called _White_ an “anti-comedy,” but I don’t see much humor here. He likewise labeled its 1993 counterpart, _Blue_, an anti-tragedy, and while that story ultimately becomes uplifting, it does supply a boatload of tragic circumstances to underscore the point. Maybe Ebert was just stretching to find a unifying theme for the trilogy. I haven’t yet watched the third entry, _Red_, but while the first two chapters are similar in many ways, they’re antithetical in others. Where _Blue_ was about growth through introspection, weathering an intense personal storm to find peace, _White_ documents a more spiteful alternative. Here, our protagonist soaks up all manner of undeserved pain and dishonor, then uses it to fuel a burning, vindictive fire. He grows, too, but in unhealthier directions. The trauma deadens his nerves, nudging him towards greed and self-gratification at others’ expense. That many of his targets probably deserve the abuse is beside the point: he’s been willingly corrupted by his hardship.

It’s a bleak and somber story, filmed in bleak and somber tones. The frigid, wintery climates of France and Poland feel stark and bare; dreary settings for the film’s unhappy, borderline-hostile, subject matter. Curious that a film named for the essence of light could produce something so dirty and dark.