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A precocious virtuosity from the start, a matchstick flare in the gloom followed by Touch of Evil in rough-hewn miniature (restless camera at dawn, squabbling trio out of a building and onto a moving trolley, colossal shadow on wall via drum fire). "Ah, the new method." Just before getting his ichthyology degree, the twentysomething student (Jerzy Skolimowski) drops out with a shrug: "I don't like fish." No escaping the draft now, the dance hall is packed with soldiers, a POV shot approaches the recruitment board. A few hours until the three o'clock train, spent on aimless meanders and shifting identities. "I'm sure to surprise you more than once." Between Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 and Godard's Masculin Féminin, parallel with Bertolucci's Before the Revolution, Skolimowski's vivid salvo of youthful turbulence. The former colleague makes do as a pimp, the rabid pooch must be put down amid an epidemic. Girls skip rope and sunbathe topless, the girlfriend in the attic and the coed in the lumberyard and the courtesan in the bathtub all bear the same face, Elzbieta Czyzewska's. The piscine element suits the generation treading water, "their romanticism was their doom." The screen is a mirrored table for upside-down reflections, a frosted window to horizontally split hands and blurs, a blank wall on which off-screen radios and telephones ring. Searching lenses and private fictions, the lad plays aspiring cosmonaut for a reporter while the old driver contributes a fabricated recollection of the Uprising. The unsettled view from the departing railroad car is swiftly resumed in Walkover. "It's always worthwhile to start anew." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |