I’ve underrated this episode in the past, and I now think this segment ranks as peak Kieslowski. He’s displaying some of his keenest psychological insights through the strange story of Romek and Hansa. Having lost the ability to use sex as the balance in their relationship, both of them invent ways to sustain erotic charge.

One of the most boring things that you can do in a movie is throw two characters in bed with each other. With that tension relieved, what do you do next? You either have to reveal the relationship as a disappointment or throw false barriers between them to overcome, all to return to that state of bliss.

The best romantic movies find ways around the loss of tension. “In The Mood for Love” gives us a couple that pretends they are play acting their spouse’s affair instead of falling in love with each other. “Annie Hall” throws in comic, neurotic concerns about the sex — Annie having to be high to enjoy herself, Alvy never thinking the sex they are having is frequent enough. Perhaps most ingeniously, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” has characters getting surgical procedures to forget one another, then falling back in love repeatedly anyway.

How do you sustain interest and passion in a relationship over time? Some people just accept the slow, sad fade. Others look for passion externally that they can bring back home in the form of fantasy and play. Romek and Hansa are up to something a little more elaborate. Romek is determined to create jealous rage over something he’s already given Hansa license to do — while simultaneously working on reviving his own erotic charge, still mentally and emotionally possible even if the body is failing him, by finding a new object of affection. As for Hansa? She’s doing something far more simple — having sex with a younger man.

Back to the action, Hansa has just come through the door. Romek is listening to Van Den Budenmeyer, absorbed in the recording. He tells her that someone has called, just shrugs when asked who it is. Hansa then gives him a package, saying she bought him something. It’s a brown tweed jacket. He clowns a bit in the jacket, showing off his new threads. Then the phone rings. Romek doesn’t pick up the phone but assumes it’s for her.

Hansa picks up the phone. It’s the young man who had called earlier, saying he wants to see her and that he expected her to be home. She agrees to meet him.

So how does Romek respond to this — by asking Hansa about the conversation, perhaps? No, he decides to wiretap the house. We see him soldering some phone equipment, creating a second line where he can listen in to the calls. Given the pervasiveness of surveillance in the eastern bloc, it’s easy to extrapolate a political meaning to the arc of their relationship as well, a doomed relationship held together by spying.

Hansa answers another call, this one from her mother, that has no important information, it just demonstrates that Romek’s tinkering worked.

Now back at the hospital, the young heart patient Ola now seeks out Romek in his office. She is again walking around the hospital in a robe. I guess she’s an in patient, but that feels odd these days — but I have no idea how health care was delivered in that time and place. Anyway, Romek says he was thinking of her, that he bought a record. She knows immediately that it was Van den Budenmeyer. I want to point out that this was a fairly elaborate piece of music by Zbigniew Preisner that they created for one episode of the Dekalog, kudos to Kieslowski and his collaborators for recognizing that they had something valuable on their hands, necessitating the creation of “The Double Life of Veronique” to fully show it off.

Back to Ola, she asks Romek if he remembers anything from the music. He starts to hum a piece, leading her to break out into angelic song. Romek is deeply moved by her singing, leading him to say that her mother is right about her needing to perform. Ola then asks Romek what he yearned for as a young man, to which he replied: to become a surgeon. She asks him if he ever thought about home, marriage, family. He shrugs and says no.

Back in the car, that pesky glove box opens up again. But this time there’s something in it — a classwork notebook with the name Mariusz on it, a collection of physics work. Romek thumbs through it then decides to throw it in the trash. After he tosses it in, one of Kieslowski’s inevitable old women taking out garbage throws a can full of refuse on top of the notebook.

But now Romek has changed his mind, he retrieves the notebook and has to wipe a great deal of disgusting stuff off of it, then returns it to the glove box which, of course, he has difficulty keeping shut.

He returns home (in the jacket Hansa bought him.) He walks in slowly and sees that she is asleep. Romek sees her handbag on the bed, takes and walks into the kitchen. He carefully unloads the contents of her bag. He finds a series of numbers written on the back of a bankbook, he decides to commit them to memory. He then carefully returns her bag to the bed.

It’s important to remember that, plotwise, everything happening here is completely unnecessary. If Hansa and Romek would simply return to that conversation about an open marriage that they began earlier, there would be no drama, conflict, guilt, jealousy — all of the energy would dissolve.

But I think what Kieslowski is arguing here is that these things are necessary parts of human eroticism, that in the absence of sex between a loving couple, a level of mystery needs to be preserved. Perhaps he is making an even stronger argument — that mystery is the essential element that binds people together, not the gymnastics that Hansa referred to in the earlier scene.