Twenty-year-old Jacek is roaming about in the grey dreariness of the Warsaw City Center. The only impulse that drives him is destructiveness, but his actions are aimless and accidental: He finds a stone on a bridge, pushes it forward so that it falls down and smashes the windscreen of one of the passing cars. He shoves a posh-looking young man into a urinal without any word of explanation. And he pulls out of his pocket that long cord and keeps fiddling around with it, until he finally commits the murder he planned: the senseless killing of a cab driver completely unknown to him, a man who just had the bad luck of taking him and not one of the other passengers who were waiting at the taxi rank.
Explanations will only follow very much later, after Jacek is sentenced to be hanged. But even in the first part of the movie the audience may find some hints which make them stop short in their condemnation of Jacek's actions. There is, for instance, the scene in the photographic shop, when he takes out an old and slightly damaged first Communion photo of a little girl and asks for an enlargement. Can you tell from a picture if a person that is on it is still alive? Such a question seems abnormal to the shop assistant. But only a little while later Jacek proves that he is perfectly capable of normal human reactions, when he merrily starts visual contact with two little girls he can see from a cafeteria.
However, we also notice the spatial distance produced by the thick window pane of the cafeteria, in which lonely Jacek consumes his piece of cake. A direct communication does no longer seem possible. He became estranged from the human beings that surround him when an awful thing happened in his life, five years ago, a fatal incident that he finally reveals to his defence counsel, just a few moments before his execution: After a booze-up he went inside a tractor, driven by a pal; there was that little girl right at the side of the road, Jacek's twelve-year-old sister; the pal failed to see her and knocked her down.
Jacek never got over this senselessly caused death of a beloved sister, and therefore this accident may be seen as the origin of Jacek's embitterment. Like a train that is derailed by an unexpected obstacle, Jacek's life got thrown off the track. The equally senseless death of the cab driver is just a logical consequence resulting from the preceding accident. And the causal chain reaction does even go further. For Jacek's death by hanging in the end is nothing more than a consistent continuation of a disastrous move of fate committed at some point of the past.
Explanations will only follow very much later, after Jacek is sentenced to be hanged. But even in the first part of the movie the audience may find some hints which make them stop short in their condemnation of Jacek's actions. There is, for instance, the scene in the photographic shop, when he takes out an old and slightly damaged first Communion photo of a little girl and asks for an enlargement. Can you tell from a picture if a person that is on it is still alive? Such a question seems abnormal to the shop assistant. But only a little while later Jacek proves that he is perfectly capable of normal human reactions, when he merrily starts visual contact with two little girls he can see from a cafeteria.
However, we also notice the spatial distance produced by the thick window pane of the cafeteria, in which lonely Jacek consumes his piece of cake. A direct communication does no longer seem possible. He became estranged from the human beings that surround him when an awful thing happened in his life, five years ago, a fatal incident that he finally reveals to his defence counsel, just a few moments before his execution: After a booze-up he went inside a tractor, driven by a pal; there was that little girl right at the side of the road, Jacek's twelve-year-old sister; the pal failed to see her and knocked her down.
Jacek never got over this senselessly caused death of a beloved sister, and therefore this accident may be seen as the origin of Jacek's embitterment. Like a train that is derailed by an unexpected obstacle, Jacek's life got thrown off the track. The equally senseless death of the cab driver is just a logical consequence resulting from the preceding accident. And the causal chain reaction does even go further. For Jacek's death by hanging in the end is nothing more than a consistent continuation of a disastrous move of fate committed at some point of the past.