Barrier

Like Identification Marks: None (1964), this begins during an important holiday: Easter. Four medical students play a game of catching a matchbox in their mouths. The one who wins takes the prize, a piggy-bank holding their joint savings, and leaves, telling his pals that he is giving up his study. With his belongings in a suitcase, the winner wanders through the unnamed town (in reality Warsaw), meeting his senile father, a war veteran, a beautiful tram driver, his university friends and a number of new people.
The protagonist of Barrier has no name in the script and is played not by Skolimowski, but by Jan Nowicki, later one of the greatest Polish stars. However, there are enough similarities between this character and Leszczyc of Identification Marks: None and Walkover (1966), to include Barrier in the Andrzej Leszczyc series. The student still comes across as a disfranchised young man attempting to find his place in the Poland of ‘small stabilisation’ of the 1960s, the period when Wladyslaw Gomulka was the leader of the Party. Unlike his predecessors, he is more consumption-oriented, wants to have immediately what took his elders decades to accumulate.
Barrier deserves attention for its stunning black-and-white cinematography; the images are clear of anything unnecessary for the action, which affords the film ascetic elegance. Krzysztof Komeda’s great score not only enhances the mood, but fills the gaps in the narrative. (EMK)

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