“The tragedy of What Belongs to Others is not simply that these people have failed to recognize one another, but that they seem to have lost the capacity to imagine that recognition might matter at all.”
“Love, it’s just face-painting. Love, it’s just easing the waiting before dying without company.”
— Daughter, “Made of Stone’
For many reasons, Grzegorz Dębowski’s What Belongs to Others (Cudze rzeczy) made me think of what the political and cultural theorist and philosopher Mark Fisher described as negative solidarity: a concept that captures the essence of living in an increasingly precarious world, one in which there is no longer any meaningful experience detached from labor. Every aspect of our lives and of our subjectivities can be, and already is, commodified. We are consequently compelled to become our own entrepreneurs, while life itself acquires no value beyond the value one is capable of producing.
One of the most aggravating aspects of this condition is the way it directly reshapes our relationships with one another. Happiness, within such a framework, can only be understood as a relative position: a ranking, a competition, a measure of how much better, or less miserably, one is doing than those around them. It is a cold and cruel reality, particularly because the subject who is unable to conceive of any way out of precarity and competition can only see, in others, a confirmation of their own suffering. Or, more brutally put: everyone must suffer as I do.
No form of solidarity can be perceived positively within such a utilitarian organization of society. We are all entrepreneurs, perpetually competing with one another, and every relationship is potentially reduced to an exchange of interests. This is the context of Kasia’s life, a woman who makes a living through petty crimes, from breaking into people’s homes to pickpocketing and taking more from the local supermarket than she has paid for. The film makes this condition immediately apparent in its opening sequence, when Kasia begs her landlord not to evict her. After failing miserably, she hears from her partner, who has been hiding because of his own legal troubles, that she should have begged harder, that she should have been more convincing.
He cannot become homeless, and he cannot be arrested. Her landlord needs her money. It is as simple as that. When Kasia tells the landlord that she has nowhere to go and might therefore kill herself, the apartment owner’s only concern is that she not do it inside the building. Everyone has their own problems, problems that constantly overlap with the lives of others, but there is no communal feeling left, no space in which solidarity might take root. Everyone must suffer as I do, to return to Fisher’s formulation.
The film translates this argument into spatial terms through the decision to set almost half of its running time, particularly its first section, inside a vast apartment complex. Every apartment looks equally cold and empty, despite all of them being occupied. Kasia and her partner can break into these homes with relative ease precisely because no one seems to know who lives there, who works there, or even who might be responsible for maintaining the building. No one is interested in anyone else’s affairs, not necessarily because of an ethic of privacy, but because the people who share the same address appear almost entirely blind to one another. Proximity does not equate to community. And it is by taking advantage of this absence of connection that Kasia’s life is changed forever.
One day, while stealing from an apartment, she discovers the body of a man who has hanged himself. No one had missed him, and the cold had helped conceal the smell. He was simply there, waiting to be found. What is left for Kasia to do but despair? Unlike in the opening sequence, when she was unable even to convincingly pretend to care about the possibility of losing her home, here the tears come naturally, followed by screams and, finally, the police. She tells them she was a friend of the deceased, and they believe her: there is no evidence of foul play. She takes his documents and begins an attempt to make sense of the man’s suicide by reconstructing the person he had been while he was still alive.
Here, What Belongs to Others poses an important question: how can a random woman speak to the police, to the family members and friends of a stranger, and simply pretend to have been his lover? And how can everyone around her accept her word so readily? His sister tells her that they stopped being a family when they left home. Their mother can barely recognize herself in the mirror on most days. His ex-wife remembers him only as deeply depressed, even during a time when people did not speak openly about depression.
In many ways, Kasia’s presence is itself the answer to the question. She becomes a reminder of their estrangement and indifference toward one another, and perhaps believing her is nothing more than a way of confronting, or avoiding, their own guilt. Or perhaps, and What Belongs to Others leaves open the possibility, they simply do not care enough to question the story. They have lived alongside this man without really knowing him, and now that he is gone, the truth of who he was may matter less than the convenience of the narrative Kasia provides.
Kasia gathers whatever fragments of a coherent narrative about the man’s past she can find. She is now on the verge of beginning a new life for herself, one shaped from everything she has taken from him: his documents, his identity, his story, and eventually his place within the memories of others. As the deceased’s significant other, she eulogizes him in a symbolic moment in which the only person speaking is the only one who never actually met him. Invented memories and real ones become indistinguishable, passed from one person to another until fiction acquires the weight of truth.
Yet none of these memories is strong enough to start a fire, to warm that church, or the lives of the people gathered inside it. The tragedy of What Belongs to Others is not simply that these people have failed to recognize one another, but that they seem to have lost the capacity to imagine that recognition might matter at all.