Jerzy Skolimowski: Two Early Films

Through the courtesy of the revived cinephobe.tv website, I recently saw these two early Skolimowski films, his second and third features. What was most instructive to me is just how much more sophisticated a filmmaker Skolimowski became between the two productions, only a year apart.

Walkover (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1965)

A fast-paced effort that, oddly enough, can best be described as an industrial sports film, Walkover uses boxing and romantic ineptitude as metaphors for the incoherence of ideology in Communist Poland. Two people arrive at a factory. Teresa (Aleksandra Zawieruszkana) is an engineer who recently completed her studies at the Polytechnic. Andrzej (Skolimowski) is her school friend, someone who dropped out of school and never became certified as an engineer. Andrzej, it seems, is there just to offer Teresa moral support, although he is clearly enamored of her. She's going to accept a position, but from the factory tour all through orientation, everyone just assumes that Andrzej is the new hire, not her.

Walkover is briskly paced and often casual in its tone, suggesting that Skolimowski really dug early Godard and Truffaut. And its primary subject turns on a dime. There is a pro-am boxing tournament based at the factory -- some kind of socialist workers' culture promotion, I guess -- and Andrzej is strong-armed into signing up. (He did some boxing in the army.) His first opponent is a factory worker and, believing Andrzej to be an engineer and so higher in the communist ranks, refuses to really fight him. This means Andrzej wins by default and is then advanced, where he faces a proven bruiser who Andrzej is afraid will kill him. 

In sports lingo, a "walkover" is an easy win, including a default victory due to an opponent’s no-show. This is just what Andrzej plans - let the other guy win, and save his own hide. He flees and wants Teresa to come away with him, and although Skolimowski is too sly to draw undue attention to it, this is really the crux of the film. A successful woman is expected to walk away from a position she earned, to support a man who is shirking a responsibility he was never entitled to in the first place. Skolimowski the director is a bit indulgent with Skolimowski the actor, who is prone to mugging. And although the editing and narrative pace could reasonably be called "rollicking," there's not very much at stake and it's not as funny as it wants to be.

Barrier (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1966)

This is more like it. Barrier is an effortlessly rigorous, beautifully etched piece of social commentary, barely disguised as an exercise in absurdism. In fact, this film would make a glorious double-feature with Chytilova's Daisies. Both films have the same anarchic spirit, but Barrier places a would-be heterosexual couple at its center, commenting on the sexes (and sexism) through comparison. The unnamed male protagonist (legendary Polish actor Jan Nowicki) is a student who is aiming to avoid any responsibility whatsoever. A cross between Bartleby and Harpo Marx, he won't even commit to a lunch with his colleagues. "Can't," he says. "I'm getting married today."

To solve this problem, he asks the first woman he sees to pose as his blushing bride. It's a tram operator (Joanna Szczerbic), who finds the guy amusing and is willing to play along. They end up at a fancy restaurant where they play subtle pranks on the upper-crust patrons, even starting a hot new fashion by making paper hats out of the socialist workers' newspaper.

At the midway point, Skolimowski shifts focus and follows the tram operator, showing us the seriousness with which she takes her career in spite of facing constant sexual harassment. This seems to be a theme in early Skolimowski. The ideals of Polish Communism -- workers' equality, an end to overt sexism -- are continually undermined by the deep-seated conservatism of Polish / Catholic culture. For everyone except the highly-placed apparatchiks, it's the worst of both worlds.

Barrier is also one of the most formally adventurous Polish films I've ever seen. Where Walkover was primarily concerned with genre-hopping and narrative jet-propulsion, this one tends to employ meticulous compositions and foreground / background relationships in order to watch them disintegrate. If we choose to read Barrier allegorically, then perhaps Skolimowski wants us to recognize that social entropy is always gnawing at the sturdiness that Warsaw Pact communism tries so hard to project. Playful misbehavior is the only way to avoid a life of enforced stultification.