Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Zbigniew Zamachowski’s Karol Karol is a sadsack of a man, kicked out of his Paris home and divorced by his, frankly, awful wife Julie Delpy’s Dominique after failing to consummate their marriage. Soon penniless, he’s reduced to begging, but makes a new friend in the shape of fellow Pole Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos), who helps Karol return to Poland.
Still pining for his wife, he makes his way back to his brother and his old hairdressing salon, but before long, and as I write this I cannot recall for the life of my why or how, has become a lookout slash bodyguard for the mob, whom he then outsmarts out of a bunch of money that he uses to set up a successful business with Karol. Then, through some poorly to not at all explained mechanics, sets up a plot to fake his own death and frame his wife for it.
This film is, I read here, about equality. I think I watched a different cut to everyone else.
This is the closest to a comedy that we’ll speak about today, veering towards the dark, but not too much. I seem to have skipped over the more amusing situations in the recap, but watching Karol’s fall and rebirth has its share of funny moments and lines, and despite sounding like total nonsense when condensed the story was interesting enough to pull me along.
I’m not all that convinced by any emotional strings this is trying to pull – Dominique’s so unsympathetic from the outset, and by the end of things Karol has also become a bit of a Jeremy Hunt, so I am not picking up whatever that last scene in the prison is laying down, other than the obvious callback to an earlier scene in Paris.
I might actually have found this the most straight-forwardly enjoyable of the films we speak about here, it being a very solid comic turn from Zamachowski. Again, I’m not sure I’m getting a lot of deeper meaning or a great deal of emotional connection to anything that’s in it. I’m no film expert, of course, I just play one on a podcast, but I’m not sure that there’s a huge amount that you can meaningfully analyse here.