X Marks The Pedwalk Tormented

In an Italian province of Calabria. Here we meet Marcello, his brother Paolo and their father, who have lost everything except hope of a better life on the other side of the Atlantic in America, where their uncle had emigrated to the year before last. Leaving their homeland and memories behind, Paolo and Giancarlo set sail for the New World. During their voyage, Marcello meets a daring orphan from Naples by the name of Antonia who will constantly lend him courage through thick and thin.

A police officer meets a girl who is near to falling into the net of shady individuals. To prevent this, he invites her into the police station and tells her a story.

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