It’s a horrible thing to be stranded within your native tongue when no one around you shares it. The mind rages at its helplessness. In such situations, rhetorical matters are irrelevant: the niceties of tropes and figures, the arrangement of thoughts, the cadence of delivery—all useless. We can even feel as though we move among a different species, one that doesn’t share the same kind of heart or possess the same basic soul. Solon was no better than a ten year-old in a place ignorant of his language.

But an interesting question arises when communicative circumstances change. Pragmatics, the study of context’s role in language use, focuses on meanings conveyed through implication, indirection, and semantic frames. To function in this way, however, the conversants must possess a knowledge of how the system works.

But that only presents another question: are there certain realms of knowledge, certain mutual experiences, that push us beyond the need for a Rosetta stone, so that the context for communication is that of a reciprocal history? Are there times when we detect a comprehension that springs from common sufferings and desires, so that we converse on a phenomenological plane?

A friend, translator Artur Rosman, recently introduced me to the films of Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi. Unfortunately, the acclaimed director’s work is translated in only a few films, and just two are available for distribution in America. His 1985 offering, A Year of the Quiet Sun, is one of them. In the work, the peculiar world of joint needs and shared histories pushes two souls beyond the barriers of language and into the realm of love, making it a captivating exploration of uncharted territory. The film has the strangely mystical quality that early Peter Weir films do (the mesmerizing Picnic at Hanging Rock; the fantastic Gallipoli), implying more afoot than the characters know.

When the picture opens, a middle-aged American soldier, Norman (Scott Wilson), decides to stay behind as World War II draws to a close. Forlorn, he wears sadness in his face so completely that his visage might never have born another emotion. In flashback, we learn that Norman has been a war prisoner, disgraced at gunpoint in the freezing cold of a German dawn by soldiers who made him stand at attention until he fouled himself. There is no one for Norman to go home to, no reason not to stay.

So he volunteers to be part of a commission investigating German war crimes. There, he awkwardly stumbles upon Emilia (Maja Komorowska), a middle-aged widow who has returned to a bombed-out Poland with her stricken mother. Emilia has pledged to let go of a past savagely torn from her: she had been married only a few months when her husband disappeared, leaving her destitute and particularly prone to shakedown artists. She too displays a record of affliction in her face, at times turning towards the sun, drinking in its light and heat as though to remind herself of a forgotten good. In stolen moments, she paints pictures that attempt to capture a luminescence lost to the world.

When Norman stops by the women’s decrepit flat one evening, the beginnings of a speechless exchange ensue. He knowing no Polish, and she knowing no English, the two nevertheless find a plateau upon which to communicate: loneliness, desolation, fear, shame—they have experienced these things and know them in each other’s eyes. And while they cobble together phrases, construct a rough pigeon, and make do with assorted gestures, their mutual affection arises out of some place that is so far down the road of want that it is beyond the necessities of icon or symbol or sign.

In fact, a young interpreter cannot understand things that Norman and Emilia say with their mature faces. His youth becomes an obstacle, in fact, and he turns indignant when the man and woman laugh at a joke born from understanding life in a way far more vast than the boy’s knowledge of their native tongues. All interpreters—even older priests and nuns who mean them well—only prove hindrances to Norman and Emilia. Each knows what the other means. Their plight of whether it is possible, at this point, to possess happiness is something that precedes all idioms. It also prompts the question of what channels they will use to achieve a diminished fulfillment, especially when afforded in ways not of their own choosing.

Under Zanussi’s careful hand, the film’s quiet achievement is this: that the context of the human tragedy can provide two damaged people with a private dialect. In the end, we can only marvel at the infinite ways that a single life can signify.

“I had no point, before this,” says Norman to Emilia; at such a thing, she can but lower her head in acceptance, a woman who knows exactly what he means, though she cannot understand a word that he is saying.