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Krzysztof Zanussi's 1974 feature Bilans Kwartalny (aka The Quarterly Balance) represented the filmmaker's first attempt to return to highbrow, intellectual fare in his native Poland, following his disastrous studio experience making the genre heist picture The Catamount Killing. This quiet, low-key character study observes a period in the life of Marta Sieminska (Maja Komorowska), a resolute but utterly unsatisfied 40-year-old Polish housewife who attempts to find self-fulfillment in an extramarital affair with a stranger but encounters only despair, suffering, and pain as her innocence is brutally ripped away.