Five short stories about people from different backgrounds whose shared trait is their inability to solve life problems. By analyzing the motives of the main characters, the film highlights the discrepancies between the reality and its subjective interpretation.
I – Time Brings Together, Time Pulls Apart
Edward reminisces about his youth and beautiful Ann who he knew back then. The girl reciprocated his feelings, but it never turned into anything more serious and eventually she broke off contact with him. Years later, Edward writes a letter to her sister Zofia, whom he also was intimate with, mistaking her for Ann.
II – Circle of Existence
An adolescent girl has only one joy in her life – going ice-skating with her aunt. Once, she meets a boy named Wacek there and falls in love with him, but because he is from the underclass her mother forbids her to see him. Eventually, she succumbs to family pressure and marries a soap industrialist.
III – Paris 1945
As WWII comes to an end, an emigrant Polish soldier meets an American woman in a hotel. They become intimate, with the mutual closeness soothing the trauma of the tragic past few years. In the morning, the girl leaves the hotel; she calls Paweł, but he answers the phone half-awake and hangs up a moment later.
IV – The Old Professor
Two men arrive in a small town looking for an old professor; it was the last wish of a dying POW from a liberated camp. The old man takes one of them, named Roger, for his former student. The meeting gives him great pleasure, which encourages Roger to play the role in which he has mistakenly been cast.
V – The Teacher
Zofia is married to a scientist who is completely absorbed in his work. Unhappy with this lack of attention from her husband, she eagerly accepts the offer of a freshly met film director to do a screen test. I an attempt to make the best impression, Zofia changes her hair and buys a new dress. However, she is in for a disappointment – it turns out that the film director was after an ordinary looking woman.
