Identification Marks: None: Jerzy Skolimowski

In a way, Jerzy Skolimowski's Identification Marks: None feels like a spiritual companion piece to Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962). Both films follow a disillusioned young person as they kill time and fruitlessly busy themselves while awaiting a deadline. Cléo waited for a cancer diagnosis. The protagonist of Skolimowski's film waits for the time he is to report to the military to officially answer his draft summons. The protagonist is identified (no pun on the title intended) as an observer early on as we are treated to scenes where he exists on the periphery of events; he walks past a street fight, he drifts through a club where a group of men play darts and dance, and the audience experiences a curious first-person sequence where he is examined by a draft board. Identification Marks: None has a heightened awareness of the mundane and minutia and understands how such things can consume and preoccupy people undergoing stressful waiting periods. At times it almost develops a stream-of-consciousness approach to the narrative. This was an ambitious feature length film debut for a young director, and it shows.

8/10