I don’t mind the rather sudden genre-shift that Kieślowski pulls here, moving away from the serious tragedy of the first film into something approaching black comedy. There are moments when the film is darkly hilarious, such as when Karol Karol’s plan to smuggle himself into Poland in a suitcase backfires horribly, with a bunch of criminals hijacking his luggage and knocking the stuffing out of him. Karol’s character arc in the first half hour of the film is the very definition of “it can’t get worse!” as he finds himself divorced, penniless, framed for a crime, hired as a contract killer, shipped home in a briefcase and beaten brutally.
I also love the idea of a character traveling via suitcase. Peter Bradshaw, the film critic with The Guardian, once observed that the films were “set somewhere which looks like the real world, but isn’t” – and I think the suitcase is perhaps the best illustration of this sort of absurdity. (The strange crossovers and recursive nature of the narrative in Three Colours Red also allude to the fact that this is a very strange little universe the Polish director has constructed.) There are nice moments to be found in the film for sure.