If the second of Krzysztof Kieslowki's Three Colours trilogy is to be believed, the definition of comedy is an elastic one; this is a film shadowy enough to have been dubbed Black. It opens with a battered old trunk buffeted and bumped along an airport conveyor belt. Next we are in a Paris court where unassuming Polish hairdresser Karol (the excellent Zbigniew Zamachowski) is being divorced by his French wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) over their unconsummated marriage. When she is asked whether she still loves him, her answer leaves Karol throwing up in the toilet. Later, homeless, supporting himself by playing Polish folk-songs on a comb in the Metro, he meets a fellow countryman (Janusz Gajos) who offers him a job. It means returning to Poland (which Karol wants) and killing a man.

Which is a lot of plot in a very little time, especially for a director who has always been the very model of economy. Karol agrees and is smuggled back in that trunk, beaten-up, returns to hairdressing with his brother, sees through his bargain, and sets about fashioning an elaborate revenge against his ruthless wife - even more plot in just a little more time; and all of which adds up to a great deal of plot for a film-maker to whom plot is seldom top of the agenda.

There is no question about who made this film: Paris is dark; Poland darker still, and very few film-makers use bottle-banks as quite such a recurring motif as this one. The script (with regular collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz) is never obscure, but never explains itself beyond the limits of the moment; motivation in a Kieslowski picture is not always clear until the end, and then not always until a second or third viewing. Additionally, it is tempting to suggest a small homage to Wenders' marvellous The American Friend with its subways and murder, but knowing this director he would probably deny all.

Blue, the first part of this trilogy based on the colours of the French flag, is nominally about liberty. In that, Julie (Juliette Binoche, seen briefly here being turned away from the courtroom) discovers through the deaths of her husband and daughter that liberty does not necessarily mean the denial of a previous life. This film takes equality as its theme, but as the director notes "there are those who are equal and those who are more equal." Karol determines to prove himself more equal than his estranged wife: "not just is he on a level with everyone else, but that he's higher, that he's better." At the end, through his bitterness, both learn of their love for one another, but by then fate has conspired to intervene. Maybe only now are they indeed finally equal.

White, which took a Silver Bear for Kieslowski at Berlin, is funny without really ever raising a laugh, and certainly (purposefully) lacks the emotional pile-driving of earlier Kieslowskis like its sibling Blue, or the tremendous The Double Life of Veronique. It is, however, one of the year's most outstanding examples of intelligent, sharp, eminently involving cinema, albeit, one suspects, a film whose mysteries are those only finally disclosed in the company of the forthcoming, reportedly magnificent Red.