Help! Did he really want revenge on his wife?

The guy had serious ego problems. He wanted to heal his ego.
It was bruised by her rejection. But he never had anything to give her.
Thus, he shouldn’t have been upset.
He’s in love with himself.
Everything he did was superficial, from his job, to the woman he loved, more like the societal “ideal” of beauty not because she was actually beautiful.
As Delpy’s Dominque proves there are beautiful women, and those that only look that way.
Each of them deserve each other like North Korea and China.
They can't get along either, and they are the perfect match. Funny how that is.

I think part of him wanted revenge to put her through what he experienced in France at the beginning: Needing a translator to talk to people, feeling like the inferior one in their relationship. Dominique divorced Karol out of spite because he couldn't satisfy her (she doesn't need to be told she's loved, she needs to feel it). But during Karol's recuperation in Poland, the more money he made and the closer he got to his ultimate goal of revenge, he realised how much he missed her and his entire scheme is almost a rite of passage for him: He's doing to her exactly what she did to him, and now he understands how she felt while she was being a spiteful bitch to him at the start. So by the end of the film, they have both gotten "even" with each other, but with a renewed understanding of each other's emotions: True equality.

Marie got her ass kicked in "Au Hasard Balthazar"

He wanted to revenge, but he also loved Dominique. The paradox of love and freedom is the main theme in The Three Colors. This is well shown in the final scene, where Karol and Dominique beckon with each other through the prison window. He wanted to get back at her, but he also loved her. He couldn't be free, he couldn't get satisfied by getting back at her, and he later on realizes this. A very good film.

"I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle"

I was not really sure if he wanted her in prison and in that context I wondered what he did when he tried to phone after sex and then reconsidered.
But the fact that he went thru with it and had his friend and brother identify the body makes it very obvious.

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The way I understood it, he wasn't out for revenge, but reconciliation, and that was only possible (at least in his mind) if she could feel compassion for his suffering, in other words, if she could suffer as he has suffered. This sounds twisted and pervers, but I don't take this as a realistic film - it is more symbolic. I also actually felt that the story was meant to suggest Poland's struggle to regain its standing in Europe - one might recall that in history France and Poland always had strong ties (no surprise considering that Poland was carved up by the other great continental powers - Russia, Prussia/Germany and Austria). In wanting to return to relations with the West, Poland must have felt a certain impotence, and felt that it was rejected and scoffed at by the Western European countries. That is why Dominique needs to come to Poland - to understand what it is like to be stripped of freedom and dignity and to rot in prison, as many people in Central Europe feel they were left to suffer because the West sacrificed them first to Nazi Germany, then to the Soviet Union. At the very beginning of the film, in the trial, Karel asks "And what about equality?" So he is introducing equality, by forcing Dominique to experience what he has experienced.

I took it more as some kind of a twisted strange Polish fairytale. He simply wanted to be with her - I think revenge is too strong a word.

I'm not going to write an essay, but I just feel it was coming from not such a mean-spirited place. I simply think he was a strange soul.

This was not revenge at all. He loved her and wanted to be with her, but he couldn't get her. So he did the ultimate brutal thing a man can do to control a woman - he locked her in a room, and now no other man can get her. Now he always knows where she is, now she is under his control.
The movie is about the changes not only in politics, but the changes in relationships between the sexes. A free woman can do what she wants, she follows her desires. And he wants to control her, he wants her to be only with him and for him. So this is what he does. This is not a revenge, this is an attempt to eternal love. This is why he cries in the end, he finally got what he wanted - her love for one man, for himself. And she does, now she loves him and only him.