‘What Belongs to Others’ Venice Review: A Place Among Strangers

Sometimes, completely by chance, an unexpected encounter can change your life. That’s more or less the premise behind What Belongs to Others, a Polish urban drama centered on a woman who makes a living through petty crime and whose life gradually —first almost imperceptibly, then more dramatically— takes a different turn after she stumbles upon a shocking, if hardly welcome, surprise. All because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To keep up with mounting debts, Kasia (Maja Pawlikowska-Kobylińska) and her boyfriend survive by committing small-time burglaries, slipping into apartment buildings, breaking into homes and stealing valuables they can later pawn for cash. It’s never enough to cover the bills, but her boyfriend keeps pushing her, and Kasia —who usually poses as a cleaning lady to gain access to buildings— doesn’t see much of an alternative. But when he ends up in jail after shoplifting from a supermarket, she’s left to navigate that world on her own.

During one of her «work rounds,» she enters an apartment and discovers that its occupant has just hanged himself. Shaken by what she finds, she becomes unexpectedly entangled in the aftermath. When other people begin arriving at the scene, they mistake her for someone close to the deceased. That’s when Kasia realizes she can turn the misunderstanding to her advantage. She begins telling everyone she was Piotr’s girlfriend, claiming they had been planning to move in together. Stretching credibility a bit —and helped along by a series of remarkable coincidences— she gradually finds herself getting to know Piotr’s family, including his mother, sister and former partner, people with whom he’d had little contact, and slowly becomes part of their lives.

What begins as a scheme to get hold of Piotr’s money —through his life insurance policy and rental income— gradually evolves into something much more complicated. Her curiosity about the man she never knew, the unusual family she gets drawn into, and the stories she hears about him slowly shift the focus of her journey. Without intending to, Kasia’s imaginary relationship with Piotr becomes profoundly important, both to her own life and to the lives of his relatives, despite the fact that it never actually existed.

The Polish director of Next to Nothing gives the story a convincing sense of realism —even if its increasingly improbable twists occasionally stretch plausibility— with a subtle touch of humanistic fantasy. Within the typically bleak landscape of Eastern European cinema, Dębowski’s film stands out for its understated sense of hope, like a rough-edged, contemporary urban fairy tale. The performances avoid easy charm; these are reserved, emotionally guarded people who can become abrasive or even hostile at the slightest provocation. But little by little, they begin to lower their defenses, revealing vulnerabilities that had remained hidden beneath the surface.

What Belongs to Others joins the long tradition of films built around assumed identities, but it approaches the theme from an original angle. Kasia never truly stops being herself, yet by pretending to have been the partner of a man she never met, she gradually becomes someone else. Not because Piotr was an extraordinary man, or because his story introduces her to wonderful people, but because of the way she’s welcomed into this new family, where she slowly finds a place —and even a purpose— thanks to her own particular qualities. Hers is less a transformation of circumstance than of perspective: she begins to see herself differently rather than literally becoming someone else. And in doing so, she comes to recognize her own humanity and fragility in that of the people around her.