A psychologist is asked about a scientific consultation with a girl who attempted suicide.

September 13, 1944. On the right bank of the Vistula, a group of young people is getting ready to cross to help the fighting Warsaw. Tadeusz, a young poet with amputated legs meets Katarzyna. Two officers of the Home Army and the AL, Polish and Soviet soldiers come here. A fight ensues with the Nazis trying to get out of the encirclement. Katarzyna is raped by one of them in front of the powerless Tadeusz. . . Two boats are sinking crossing the Vistula. Tadeusz falls into the river with a wheelchair ...

Bearing traces of the old Anton Chekhov play The Wedding, The Contract is set during an "arranged" ceremony. The bride and groom barely know each other, but this matters not at all to their tradition-bound families. At the last minute, the bride balks. Only slightly nonplused, the groom's father, a status-seeking doctor, decides to go ahead with the expensive reception anyway. Polish director Krzysz Zanussi uses this scenario to stick it to capitalist corruption, and to society's destruction of the individual spirit. Leslie Caron, the one recognizable member of the cast, is outstanding as a wealthy, over-the-hill ballerina who happens to be a kleptomaniac.

In what appears to be an inexplicable incident, a man drives up to a resort hotel in midwinter, throws away his car keys, enters, and proceeds to agitate everyone he meets with his urgency -- a message he is somehow unable to communicate. Then he leaves, disappearing in the snow. Later, the people he appeared to have upset have gathered to search for him and find him frostbitten, but alive. Visiting him at the sanatorium to which he has been taken, they gradually discover what was really happening.

A student who missed his final exam because of illness arrives at his professor's house to beg to be allowed to take it.

A lonely Piotr Płaksin, who makes a living from part-time jobs, lives his dreams of a trip to the Easter Islands on a self-built yacht. One day a man learns that he has become a father.

Anna, a stay-at-home mom stifled by the tedium of domestic life, becomes obsessed with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and yearns for her own grand romance. In a bid to escape her loneliness she splurges her savings on fashion and cosmetics and arranges a secret tryst, only to find that reality can never match her daydreams, and she must choose between her fantasies and her family.

An actor visits his father in a nursing home to study his mannerisms in preparations for the role of Faust.

Film chronicles a decade in the life of a young physics student whose absolute faith in the primacy of rationality and science is shaken by tragedy and affairs of the heart.

A moral conflict between a young assistant and an associate professor arises during a university linguistics camp.