Le Départ

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Skolimowski

1967 / 93min / DCP

To make his first film outside of Poland, Skolimowski headed to Brussels to team up with Jean-Pierre Léaud, Catherine Duport, and cinematographer Willy Kurant—all fresh from the set of Godard’s Masculin Féminin. The result was the alternately frenetic and lyrical Le Départ, in which Léaud plays a gearhead hairdresser determined to drive his boss’s Porsche in a rally car race, a stinging satire of manic materialism which derives its antic energy from Léaud’s hyperkinetic speed demon performance and Krzyztof Komeda’s score, which ranges from passages of moody melancholy to clangorous free jazz.