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Post-war Germany: Like so many other women, Gerda Krause has lost her husband during the war and has to fend for herself and her two children. She finds work as a seamstress but refuses the offering of her department chief Zimmermann to upgrade her qualifications. One day she meets Uschi, an old friend of hers, whom she has helped with schoolwork before the war and subsequently lost track of. The reunion reminds Gerda of her childhood dream: to become a teacher. Thus, she decides to enroll at university to make her dream come true.

The footloose ennui of Poland’s postwar generation is captured to perfection in this jazzy chronicle of a draft-dodger’s final day of freedom. A slacker before there was a word for it, Andrzej (played by Skolimowski himself) drifts through a series of open-ended encounters with women following a wake-up argument with his pouting wife, and a long-delayed military physical (the film’s title derives from one of the questions). Skolimowski hoarded four years’ worth of the annual film footage allotment from his Lódz film school in order to create this first feature marked by compositional bravado and a trademark air of the absurd. -Barbara Scharres, Gene Siskel Film Center

Drama about Feliks Dzerzhinsky's life