alr

Le Départ

Screening on Film
Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski.
With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, Jacqueline Bir.
Belgium, 1967, 35mm, black & white, 93 min.
French with English subtitles.

By making his first non-Polish film in Belgium with nouvelle vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud and his Masculin-Féminin co-star Catherine Duport, Skolimowski engaged in an open dialogue with the French New Wave to which his films had been compared from the very beginning. In his irrepressible portrayal of a hairdresser obsessed with race cars and his dream of entering the fastest model Porsche in a weekend rally, Léaud offers an energized and eccentric variation of the drifting young men in Skolimowski’s early films. Le Départ’s zany story of racing and intrigue is fascinating for its vision of a postwar Europe obsessed with speed and modernization, a theme infused with a gentle melancholy by Komeda’s haunting, jazz inflected score. – HG

Part of film series

Read more

The Radical Visions of Jerzy Skolimowski

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Read more

Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

Read more

Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

Read more

Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

Read more

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue

Read more

David Lynch, New Dimensions

Read more

Museum Hours: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

Read more

Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

Read more

Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy