Emptiness Forever: Le Départ (1967)

Michael Walker

With Le Départ, Jerzy Skolimowski moved out of Poland for the first time; he filmed it in Belgium, with an added complication that he didn’t understand any French. (His answer to a question about the transition is instructive: he finds the problem of putting the camera in the right place before shooting so difficult, that it does not matter to him at all whether the filming takes place in Poland, Belgium or Hollywood.) Skolimowski, not surprisingly, does not have as much to say about Belgium as Poland. He may look at the city of Brussels with a fresh eye: the architecture of roadways; the gleaming opulence of the motor show; the ritualistic presentation of the female form at a swimsuit display; but these reveal little more than his fascination (as an East European) with their appearance.

Nevertheless, if Le Départ seems lightweight Skolimowski, it is nonetheless his film. The hero, Marc (Jean-Pierre Léaud), is in the tradition of the Skolimowski heroes: a young hairdresser who dreams of becoming a famous rally car driver. He also seems to have a far greater likelihood of achieving his dream than the student in Barrier (1966); whereas the latter does no more than look covetously at the cars of the rich, Marc is constantly finding ways and means of getting to drive them (communist subservience versus capitalist opportunism?). His problem is to obtain a Porsche (and not a 912 but a 911S) for a rally at the weekend; his journey derives from his single-minded pursuit of this end. Le Départ is, however, much funnier than Skolimowski’s previous films. If the student’s journey seemed dream-like, Marc’s is simply bizarre, encompassing a con-trick, which involves a friend dressed as a Mahrajah, to obtain a car; a sausage vendor who pokes a sample of his wares up a Porsche’s exhaust (and later says to the hero: “You want a sausage? Then blow up my tires!”); a pursuit of the heroine in which the hero lies in front of the tram she is on; concealment of hero and heroine in the boot of a car; seduction of the hero as he drives a car by its middle-aged lady owner; and a car theft which has to be abandoned because a dog turns up in the back seat.

As for the heroine, Michèle (Catherine Duport), she has the slightly ‘older and wiser’ demeanour of the Skolimowski heroine; she joins the hero on his journey, but remains cool as he builds up to frenzy. And ultimately, like the girl in Barrier, she comes to awaken the hero from the single-mindedness of his course. It should perhaps be mentioned that Skolimowski chose these two players after seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Masculin-Féminin (he also took Willy Kurant as cameraman). The choice I find quite subtle, since, although Godard permutated his five protagonists in Masculin-Féminin fairly comprehensively, he did not develop the one potentially fruitful relationship: between Paul (Léaud) and Catherine (Duport). Accordingly Le Départ is, in part, Skolimowski’s development of this relationship; he has expanded the characterisations from Godard’s film, but not drastically altered them as actor-portrayals. Masculin-Féminin was our first glimpse of Léaud’s ‘adult’ screen persona; Skolimowski has simply brought this out to the full: Marc is the definitive Léaud role – quick, energetic, humorous, histrionic, and as aggressive in conflict as he is sensitive and shy with the heroine. And Skolimowski uses Catherine Duport’s rather upper-bourgeois coolness to counterpoint Léaud’s histrionics, much as did Godard, except that Skolimowski does allow her to come alive as well. One cannot imagine Godard giving a daughter of the bourgeoisie such a choice opening line as Michèle’s here when, in reply to Marc’s question about the possibility of a dog having rabies, she says (with reference to her employer) ‘Not unless Madame van der Put bit him’.

Over the pre-credit sequence to Le Départ (which shows Marc hurrying to the garage where his boss’ Porsche is kept), there is a song which for the first time makes explicit the solitude of the Skolimowski hero: ‘Emptiness forever, around us, despite us’. The song (and its theme) do in fact recur throughout the movie in the manner of a love-theme; but it is a melancholy love-theme, underlining the continuing loneliness rather than expressing ‘togetherness’. It is used most beautifully in the sequence in the deserted motor showroom, when Marc and Michèle sit in the two halves of a divided car which is rotating slowly on a turntable: as the car turns, we watch the halves separate, dividing the couple, which both visualises the emptiness expressed in the words of the song and links this emptiness to the hero’s obsession with cars. In fact, the obsession tends more to a fixation. Without being too psychoanalytical about it, one senses that Marc has always tried to fill the emptiness with action (he is hardly ever still; even whilst waiting for a lift he bounds around the banisters) and that driving fast cars became the logical culmination of this, enabling him to achieve the greatest sublimation of his energies. Certainly the sequences where he spins, whirls and skids his car around the streets of Brussels are amongst the most lyrical in the film. However he has reached a point where everything is subordinated to his need to drive; and although one has every sympathy with the liberties he makes with his employment (which must be frustrating his energies in the extreme) he is scarcely any more considerate with Michèle. He dates here simply in order to have an accomplice cum alibi when he goes to the motor show to steal spare parts (in order that he can sell these and hire a car). However, before he can do this he and Michèle have to hide out in the boot of a car, and it is here that we witness their first gestures of communication with each other.

Excerpted from an essay on Skolimowski published in Ian Cameron (ed.), Second Wave (London: Studio Vista, 1970). Reprinted with permission of the author.