Skolimowski, Godard, and Le Départ
In 1967, Jerzy Skolimowski made a film that, at first glance, looks unmistakably like a child of the French New Wave.
Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the lead. The camera, handled by Willy Kurant, moves with a loose, improvisational freedom. The score, by the Polish jazz composer Krzysztof Komeda, pulses with nervous energy. Everything about Le Départ suggests an easy kinship with the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard.
And yet the film quietly breaks away from that lineage.
Where the New Wave saw rebellion—sometimes even revolution—Skolimowski sees something smaller and more stubborn: a young man trying, quite literally, to get moving.
Chapter I
Le Départ — a point of rupture
In the spring of 1967, Skolimowski was thirty years old and newly arrived in Western Europe. His film Ręce do góry! had been blocked by Polish censors, and the director found himself working abroad for the first time. Brussels became the unlikely setting for his next film, a Belgian production shot in French—a language he barely spoke.
The cast seemed designed to flatter the expectations of the moment. Léaud, already the emblematic face of the New Wave, had carried the restless spirit of a generation through films by François Truffaut and Godard. Catherine Duport appeared alongside him. Kurant, whose camera had helped shape the visual language of French modernism, handled the cinematography. Komeda supplied the music.
On paper, it looked like a continuation of the same cinematic revolution.
But very quickly the film reveals another intention.
Marc, the young man Léaud plays, works as an assistant in a hair salon. His dream is simple to the point of absurdity: he wants to enter a car rally. What he needs is a Porsche, and the entire film becomes a series of improvised attempts to obtain one. He borrows, begs, schemes, and drags the young woman Michèle into the whirl of his plans.
The film moves at the tempo of his agitation. Léaud runs through the city, bursts into nervous laughter, throws himself into one desperate idea after another. Scenes unfold in long takes that seem to follow the actor’s body rather than a script: wigs tried on in front of mirrors, late-night wanderings through the hair salon, sudden detours through the streets of Brussels.
Then, abruptly, the motion stops.
Marc never gets the car. Instead, the film slows to a quiet moment in a hotel room, where the frantic chase dissolves into something unexpectedly intimate.
When Le Départ won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1967, it was widely seen as a triumph of youthful cinema—light, improvisational, almost carefree. The film seemed less interested in making an argument than in capturing the energy of a young body in motion.
Yet that lightness conceals something else.
Formally, the film speaks the language of the New Wave: spontaneity, fragmented narrative, a camera that appears to discover the scene as it unfolds. Léaud brings with him the entire vocabulary of that cinema—the darting glances, the sudden laughter, the fragile intensity that had become inseparable from the heroes of Godard and Truffaut.
But beneath the resemblance lies a difference that is difficult to miss once it appears.
In Godard’s films, escape is often an act of destruction. His characters run in order to break something—social order, bourgeois morality, sometimes the narrative itself. Movement becomes a political gesture.
Marc runs for another reason.
He is not trying to blow up the world. He is trying to slip out of it.
The distinction has less to do with style than with history. The Poland in which Skolimowski had grown up—shaped by Stalinism and by the uneasy stagnation that followed the political thaw—had already lived through its own version of revolutionary transformation. In that context, grand promises of collective emancipation had a way of turning into mechanisms of control.
For someone formed in that environment, revolution was not an idea. It was a fact.
Marc therefore seeks no historical upheaval. What he wants is something much smaller: a private miracle.
The Porsche he dreams of is not a symbol of capitalist desire or Western freedom. It is simply the possibility of movement. A moment when the body can escape the place that confines it. Marc does not want to overthrow capitalism in Brussels. He wants, for a few minutes, to leave the hair salon and feel speed.
That is why Le Départ marks a quiet rupture.
It adopts the formal language of the New Wave only to reveal its limits. Where Godard still believes that cinema can ignite a revolution, Skolimowski looks at the world with the wary knowledge of someone who has already seen revolutions happen—and seen what follows them.
His hero does not try to repeat that story.
He runs away from it.
Chapter II
The Boy Who Has Already Seen the End of the World — Léaud as the Mirror of Two Rebellions
In the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the man often remains a boy. Nervous, impulsive, prone to sudden gestures—yet still convinced that the world might be overturned by a single decisive act. The heroes of his films rebel against their parents, against the bourgeoisie, against the social order itself. Their rebellion can be ironic, hysterical, sometimes absurd, but it almost always carries a trace of hope.
One need only recall Ferdinand in Pierrot le fou, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who flees with Marianne on a blood-soaked romantic odyssey, paints his face blue, and ultimately blows himself up like a comic-book hero at the end of the world. Or the young radicals of La Chinoise, or the grotesque revolutionary of Made in U.S.A.. In these films violence, irony, and revolutionary rhetoric mix into a strange youthful energy. Even when the characters are misguided, they remain convinced that a gesture, a word, or a bullet might still change something.
This is precisely why Jean-Pierre Léaud became one of the defining faces of this cinema. Since The 400 Blows, where he played Antoine Doinel for François Truffaut, Léaud carried with him the image of a young man unable to fit into the world yet certain that the world might still be remade.
When Léaud appears in Le Départ, the spectator brings this entire legacy with him. The gestures are familiar: the restless movements, the sudden bursts of laughter, the wide-eyed gaze of a boy who reacts faster than he thinks. The score seems the same. Yet the music sounds different.
Marc is neither an intellectual nor a revolutionary. He quotes no philosophers, reads no Marx, and engages in no ideological debate. He is an assistant in a Brussels hair salon with a single obsession: a car. A Porsche that would allow him to enter a rally race.
In a Godard film, such a motif would immediately become a political metaphor. In Skolimowski’s film it remains something far more elementary. It is not a project of collective freedom. It is an attempt to recover movement itself.
Marc does not want to overthrow any system.
He wants to slip out of it.
This difference arises from something deeper than cinematic style. It arises from historical experience. For Godard’s generation, revolution was largely an image—a political promise yet to arrive. For Skolimowski’s generation it was something that had already happened and had left behind a landscape of ruins.
Communism in Eastern Europe was not an abstract idea from books. It was a daily reality: a system of censorship, propaganda, queues, small humiliations, and constant supervision. In such a world, the grand language of liberation easily turned into an instrument of power.
The hero of Skolimowski’s film therefore rebels differently. His rebellion is not directed outward toward the world. It turns inward.
Marc does not dream of revolution. He dreams of a moment in which he will no longer be a cog in a machine. The Porsche becomes his private totem—not because it symbolizes capitalist success, but because it represents the possibility of movement: a brief instant in which a person ceases to be administered by a system.
Léaud plays the role with the same nervous temperament we know from the New Wave. Yet in Le Départ his laughter has a different resonance. It is no longer the laughter of youthful rebellion. It is the laughter of someone who already suspects that rebellion alone is not enough.
This is why the ending of the film feels so unexpected. Marc does not give up the rally because he loses. He gives it up because, in a hotel room with Michèle, he discovers something speed cannot provide: an ordinary moment of presence. A moment in which he no longer has to pretend that he is changing the world.
In this sense, Skolimowski’s hero seems strangely older than Godard’s characters. Not because he has lived longer, but because he carries within him the knowledge of how the great projects of collective transformation end.
Godard’s films continue to ask a certain question: how can the order of the world be overthrown?
Skolimowski asks another: how does one live when that order has already collapsed?
It may be for this reason that his cinema feels unexpectedly contemporary today. His hero promises no salvation. He announces no great transformation.
He promises something far more modest:
the possibility of continuing to live.
Chapter III
Woman: Instrument of Revolution or an Other Who Cannot Be Possessed
In the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the woman is rarely the autonomous center of the story. More often she appears as a figure through whom the man attempts to articulate his own rebellion. She becomes a projection, a surface upon which his desires are written—a body that gathers together his fantasies of freedom, violence, and escape.
A clear example is Marianne in Pierrot le fou, played by Anna Karina. For Ferdinand—Belmondo’s character—she is everything at once: an escape from bourgeois life, erotic fulfillment, inspiration for romantic revolt. Their journey through the south of France resembles a revolutionary fantasy of two lovers determined to blow up the world. Yet the structure of that fantasy remains unmistakably masculine. Marianne exists primarily as part of his project—as the body through which his rebellion can take shape.
When the project collapses, she collapses with it.
In Godard’s cinema the woman often shares the fate of the ideas the male hero tries to experience through her. She appears as the promise of freedom, only to vanish, be betrayed, abandoned, or turned into a victim.
Nor is this confined to a single character. In many of Godard’s films—from the early works with Karina to later films with Anne Wiazemsky—the woman remains primarily a site of projection. The camera celebrates her presence, her body, her gaze, yet rarely grants her genuine narrative initiative. Even when the heroines appear “liberated” by cinematic modernism—through long takes, direct looks into the camera, or improvised dialogue—they remain part of a structure built around male experience.
In Le Départ, Skolimowski does something far simpler—and for that reason more radical.
Michèle, played by Catherine Duport, is neither symbol nor metaphor. She is simply someone other.
The film shows the world through Marc’s eyes: a nervous, impulsive boy incapable of thinking about anything except his Porsche. The camera follows his panic, his agitation, his obsession. Yet Michèle never becomes fully absorbed into this projection. She accompanies him through his improvised adventures—trying on wigs, wandering through the city at night, participating in his chaotic schemes to obtain a car—but she does so with a distance that signals difference from the very beginning.
Her calm contrasts with his hysteria.
Her self-possession with his nervous urgency.
When Marc launches into new plans, she often watches him with mild amusement—as if observing a boy who has not yet realized that the world does not revolve around his obsessions.
Paradoxically, it is precisely this asymmetry that gives her presence.
Skolimowski does not attempt to turn her into an ideological heroine. Nor does he pretend that Marc “liberates” her. Instead he shows something simpler—and truer: a man so absorbed in his own fantasy of freedom that he cannot fully possess another person.
One of the film’s most revealing moments takes place before a mirror. Michèle tries on wigs, plays with her reflection, multiplies her image across the surface of the glass. The camera refuses to fix her in a single identity. Instead it disperses her, duplicates her, lets her slip away from definition.
In Marc’s world everything converges toward a single goal: the rally race.
In Michèle’s world things remain open.
This is why the film’s ending does not resemble the triumph of male desire. When Marc abandons the race, he does not win the woman as a prize. He simply stops beside her.
The intimacy that follows emerges from renunciation—from the moment when the boy stops chasing his fetish and begins to see another person.
In Skolimowski’s cinema the woman therefore remains someone who cannot be fully possessed or defined. She is another presence within the hero’s world, not the projection of his idea.
Here lies the final difference between the two filmmakers.
In Godard’s films the woman often becomes the instrument of a great idea—revolution, freedom, political transformation. In Skolimowski’s world such ideas no longer organize human relationships. The director, shaped by a society that had already experienced the consequences of grand promises of collective salvation, no longer believes in telling human stories through them.
His hero neither liberates the woman nor attempts to dominate her.
He simply has to accept that he does not fully understand her.
And paradoxically it is precisely this renunciation that opens a space for freedom.
Skolimowski does not proclaim a manifesto about the emancipation of women. He does not need to. It is enough that he stops pretending the man is the center of the world.
Once that illusion disappears, the woman can remain something more than a symbol.
She can remain a person.
Margot ROUSSEAU
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