In 1939, bourgeois student Pawel rebels against his conservative upbringing by running away to the countryside with jaded dancer Lidka. Their idyll is ruined first by their families, and then by the onset of war. Reconnecting years later, the pair reflect on the traumas suffered since and question their capacity to love again.
In this story of a doomed romance, Has conjures a fatalistic image of a society riven by unbreachable divides in this early directorial effort that proved highly influential for the nascent Polish Film School of the late 1950s.