What Belongs to Others

 

To be oneself, one must be someone.
— Stanisław Jerzy Lec 

Grzegorz Dębowski constructs one of the most paradoxical forms of rebirth: a woman who possesses nothing of herself begins to exist by appropriating the life of a dead man. 

The starting point might seem to belong to the realm of the social thriller, but the film moves elsewhere. Here, the theft is not merely about objects. It is about identity. And perhaps this is the most radical theft of all: taking someone else’s biography in order to finally possess one’s own. 

Kasia lives in a condition of radical material and ontological precariousness. She steals because her existence has already been stolen from her. Darek, her violent partner, is not merely the man who abuses her: he is the human mechanism through which her identity is constantly erased. She is not a person beside him, but something that belongs to him. A body at his disposal, an accomplice, a presence necessary for his survival. 

There is a sentence in the relationship between the two that condenses an almost metaphysical brutality. When Kasia tells him that he has always been cruel to her, Darek replies: “Who else was I supposed to be cruel to? I only have you.” 

It is a monstrous answer precisely because it does not even attempt to justify itself. 

Contained within those words is an idea of the other as property. There is no otherness, no recognition, no reciprocity: there is only availability. You are the only person I have, therefore you are also the only person upon whom I can exercise my violence. The other is no longer someone standing before me; the other is simply what I have at my disposal. 

Dębowski understands that the deepest form of violence does not necessarily consist in taking a life. It can consist in taking away from a person the very perception that they have one. 

As in Woman Unknown, Kasia is alive, but her life seems not to belong to her. 

And this is precisely why the body of the man found in the apartment produces a narrative and existential rupture. That dead man possesses, paradoxically, something she has never possessed: a recognizable life. 

He has a home. He has objects. He has letters. He has relationships. He has a mother. He has a sister. He has an ex-wife. He has left traces behind. He even has an absence that others can perceive. 

Kasia, by contrast, seems not to have enough traces to prove that she has ever been someone. 

And so the impossible happens: the death of the other becomes the possibility of her existence. 

Kasia enters the dead man’s life pretending that she had been part of it. But the further she proceeds into that lie, the more intrusive the question becomes: what is really false, and above all, what is truly out of place? 

The lie is false, naturally. The identity is false. The past she recounts is false. 

But what that lie produces within her is authentic. 

For the first time, Kasia possesses continuity. She can say: I have been here, I knew this person, I lived in this place, I loved, I lost, I remember. She can construct a past and, through that past, finally imagine a future. 

It is one of the film’s most compelling paradoxes: Kasia must become someone else in order to become herself. She is not simply impersonating someone. She is experiencing, for the first time, the possibility of having an identity. 

And here What Belongs to Others assumes a much broader existential dimension. Identity does not appear as something we naturally possess, a substance enclosed within us and simply waiting to be recognized. It is a fragile construction, composed of memory, relationships, places, objects, stories, and above all the recognition of others. No one exists entirely alone. 

We need someone to call us by name, to remember something about us, to know where we have been, to acknowledge our story. A person can be materially alive and yet socially and symbolically nonexistent. Kasia seems to come precisely from that place. 

And this is what makes her appropriation as disturbing as it is understandable. She does not simply steal a house: she steals the conditions that make it possible to feel like a person. 

The dead man’s home thus becomes something more than a physical space. It is the place where Kasia discovers the possibility of having a place in the world. The objects become fragments of a biography that she can finally touch. The letters become a surrogate memory. The encounters with the people who belonged to that man become a kind of clandestine adoption. 

Kasia does not inherit a life. She occupies it. And yet, precisely by occupying it, she begins to transform herself. 

The film thus becomes a reflection on the meaning of the word belonging. To belong to someone can be the most terrible form of slavery, as in her relationship with Darek. But to belong to something can also simply mean finally having a symbolic place in which to exist. 

The protagonist thus moves from an imposed belonging to an invented one. But it is only through this second form of belonging that she slowly begins to belong to herself. 

It is a magnificent and cruel contradiction. 

The title itself, What Belongs to Others, contains this ambiguity. Everything Kasia desires seems to belong to others: other people’s homes, other people’s money, other people’s objects, other people’s lives. She is always outside. Always standing before a door that does not belong to her. 

Her transformation, then, is not simply moral; it is ontological: she does not suddenly become a good person. She becomes, for the first time, a person who can choose. 

And this is true emancipation. 

The decisive passage does not consist in Kasia ceasing to steal. It consists in her beginning to understand that she is not condemned to be what others have made of her. Her identity is no longer completely determined by the violence she has suffered, by poverty, by her relationship with Darek, by marginality. It can be rewritten. 

But Dębowski does not make this possibility consoling. On the contrary, he keeps it within a morally ambiguous territory. Kasia obtains freedom through an imposture. She constructs her own dignity by appropriating another person’s dignity. 

It is precisely this ambivalence that makes the film so compelling. 

Because perhaps the most disturbing question is not whether Kasia has the right to live another person’s life. 

The film seems to answer without proclamations: when a person has been reduced to mere survival, even identity can become a luxury. 

Before she is a thief, Kasia is a person who has been deprived of the right to perceive herself as a subject. 

Dębowski’s cinema thus finds its sharpest point in the short circuit between theft and restitution. A woman who has always lived by taking from others slowly begins to return what she has taken; and in the very moment she gives back to others, she recovers something of herself. Her trajectory becomes that of a human being who, for the first time, understands that dignity does not consist in possessing what belongs to others, but in being able to choose what to do with one’s own existence. 

For the confirmation of my identity, I depend entirely upon others.
— Hannah Arendt