It begins like nothing so much as a [Jean] Gabin picture, with meaty jazz score and stolen car hurtling at us through the night. And very rarely during the frolics that follow does Le Départ give any reminder that its inventive, lively, and sometimes rather glib young director is, in fact, Polish. Had this been his first film …, Skolimowski's nationality would have been largely irrelevant; but the trio of films he has so far made in Poland act as an inevitable reference point, particularly as in shedding his country he also seems to have cast off both the anger and the armoury that made his previous work bristle with such satisfying complexity. As Le Départ romps from one piece of slapstick to the next one begins to wonder uneasily if Barrier, allegiances to Godard and Fellini and all, was not—as it seemed to be—a daring rejection of contemporary Polish nostalgia, but actually a step backwards into the comparative security of already well-tried themes.

In retrospect, Walkover certainly seems to have been less fraught than Barrier with the same hangovers that obsessed [Andrzej] Munk and Wajda; while Rysopis, raw, introvert, and raggedly uncommunicative, begins to look remarkably like the most original of the three. The hero of Barrier may sit apart from the chaotic unanimity of the dance-hall where meaningless applause (fingers on glass) greets the pointless act (a man revolving on an overhead fan), just as medals used to be awarded for wartime heroism. Yet he, too, strives for a deed worth the doing, and his slide down the ski-slope on a smouldering suit-case, sabre in hand, blood-donation poster on head, takes him and us straight back to the brutal eradication of Polish hopes as described in [Wajda's] Ashes and Diamonds or Lontna. The war is over—but at least it was a war and at least it meant action, direction and purpose. And these are qualities which Skolimowski's characters, wandering like lost souls, have never previously been able to find.

With Le Départ, however, the insane glory has undergone a radical change. Jean-Pierre Léaud could only be French, and neutral buildings, glassy modern showrooms, and anonymous open roads are his battleground. He does have an obsession, but it is clearly defined, unlike the malaise of his predecessors, and it is centred not upon nationalist desperation but upon capitalist luxury—the need to obtain a Porsche long enough for him to take part in a motor rally. (p. 12)

Opting out in favour of the happy ending is of course one of the most ancient of tales, and Skolimowski's claims for the supremacy of sex are unlikely to surprise any but the most ardent of motor-rally fans, even if they come as a shock to his own hero. What does surprise is that the Polish rebel should reach so tame a conclusion…. Léaud puts all the vehemence and aggression of a freedom-fighter into his hunt for a vehicle, and to this extent is clearly linked with the belligerent Skolimowski image; at the same time, that image has softened so considerably that his frantic violence seems merely a combination of excess enthusiasm and ludicrously anti-social eccentricity. In a Polish environment it might have worked; in a curiously non-specific Belgian one it just comes out as cute.

Skolimowski's comedy, then, is not so much a departure as a modification. Apart from such tiny relics of Polanski-style humour as the trampish sausage-vendor, his Polishness has become submerged in a welter of international influences, including Wilder, Lester and [Milos] Forman, and while there is plenty of glossy self-indulgence (like the persistent closeups of the bikini fashion parade), there is nothing really to equal the ski-run sequence in Barrier, the superb long-distance ten-minute take in Walkover, or that startling shot in Rysopis which takes us all the way down a flight of stairs. Dominating everything in Le Départ, of course, is the Godard touch…. (pp. 12, 49)

Fortunately, the film nevertheless gets along very nicely as sheer farce in its own right…. Skolimowski's visual flair, although muted, occasionally produces some spectacular shooting, especially of Porsches at high speed, and his taste for symbolism (wigs, mirrors, projected images, recurrent references to things Indian) has clearly not yet abandoned him. But if Le Départ adds anything to what we already knew about Skolimowski, it proves mainly that he is currently more inspired in his bitterness than in his jokes. (p. 49)