Barrier

A young man abandons medical school in his final year, leaves the dormitory and heads into the city. He carries a suitcase and wears an inherited coat; he is neither looking for work nor going anywhere. He meets a woman who works on the trams, and the film runs across a night that moves back and forth between them. It is not interested in a portrait of youth. It is interested in a reckoning with the war generation: the hero is sick of his fathers' stories of heroism and can find no place in the order they built. The title comes from the wall between those two generations. The form deliberately breaks from realism: dream sequences, surreal images, choreographed crowds, frames full of symbols. The long-take approach of Skolimowski's first two films gives way here to something more fragmented and more poetic. This is his fourth feature and stands outside the Leszczyc series about his alter ego. The film won the grand prize at the Bergamo Film Festival in 1967. Joanna Szczerbic and Jan Nowicki star. Who it is for: viewers who like Polish cinema, sixties modernist narrative and symbolic form. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story. The film offers almost no plot and explains none of its images.