After the news of the hunger strike, the movie shifts tone suddenly and radically. Up to this point, Ula hasn’t expressed much about her late husband Antek. But we see her in the next scene hurrying to her apartment and then hurriedly tearing through personal effects to find something.

She comes across some carton of sea shells but immediately throws them out. Then she goes looking for pictures and finally comes across a very old picture of Antek, when he was a teenager, at the beach with some women.

This feels like a continuity problem in the movie to me. If the rushing through pictures scene had come directly after the one where she met the woman who knew Antek when she was younger, it would make a lot more sense — she gets jealous about a woman from his past, thinks there might be a picture he kept from that time and storms after it. But a lot happened in between that moment and when she’s in a mad rush, so it doesn’t make cinematic sense.

Anyway, even though the continuity is kind of a mess, we get the point that Ula is now thinking about her late husband, maybe feeling some jealousy over women he knew before they met. She’s next at a lunch with Antek’s old friend Tomek. She asks him details about the woman in the picture — but Tomek says she has the details wrong, he was infatuated with the “skinny blonde” in the photo, not the woman she just met with the political activists. Tomek says that Antek was always falling for the “same woman,” which was also her.

He then tries to shift gears and say how he is still in love with her. But Ula is distracted — she sees a man in the restaurant whose hands remind her of Antek, Kieslowski’s hand fetish becoming most explicit in this scene. Next, in a highly typical moment of coincidence/fate, Tomek sees his car being towed away, so he has to rush after it.

This leads to an awkward meet/pick up between Ula and this weird looking guy referred to as “the American” even though his accent is clearly British. The guy somehow thinks Ula is a sex worker and offers her $50. Even in the mid-80s, this seems like an extremely low price for a woman like Ula, but she laughs and takes him up on it.

We cut now to a hotel room where the very brief, very odd sex scene takes place. It’s surprisingly explicit for a Polish film of this era. In fact, it’s the most explicit sex scene of Kieslowski’s career. And it seems like really bad sex — it barely lasts a minute — and I don’t know how Ula could even continue on with it when she got a closer look at “the American’s” body … which included this completely bizarre patch of bushy hair on his lower back. How the hell was this strange looking guy cast for this role?

But they have sex, converse a bit in English, then Ula asks if he knows any Polish and when he says no, she takes this as an opportunity to catch us up on her feelings — that she walked through her marriage not feeling terribly satisfied by it, having a vague sense that she was unhappy. But now that Antek is gone, she finally realizes just how happy she was and she misses him terribly, she can’t move on.

So, basically, she’s saying that grief has hit her and she didn’t expect to feel it so strongly. She then repeats that she picked him up because his hands reminded her of Tomek. I only hope for Ula’s sake that Antek didn’t have the same bizarre body hair.

By the way, I have to mention, since we never got a chance to see Grazyna Szappolowska naked in either Dekalog 6 or “A Short Film About Love,” I now fully understand why she was the object of obsession. Her body is spectacular.

So, now the movie is on some new terrain — it took half the movie for it to finally arrive in this typically Kieslowskian place, but now we know that Ula has fallen prey to obsessive love for a ghost.