It begins like nothing so much as a [Jean] Gabin picture, with meaty jazz score and stolen car hurtling at us through the night. And very rarely during the frolics that follow does Le Départ give any reminder that its inventive, lively, and sometimes rather glib young director is, in fact, Polish. Had this been his first film …, Skolimowski's nationality would have been largely irrelevant; but the trio of films he has so far made in Poland act as an inevitable reference point, particularly as in shedding his country he also seems to have cast off both the anger and the armoury that made his previous work bristle with such satisfying complexity. As Le Départ romps from one piece of slapstick to the next one begins to wonder uneasily if Barrier, allegiances to Godard and Fellini and all, was not—as it seemed to be—a...