BAND OF OUTSIDERS Movie Review

Bande à Part
The Outsiders

Though they have a reputation for despising things American, the French have always been the first to recognize the beauty and daring in so many of the American movies that we considered to be disposable. Jean-Luc Godard dedicated his pioneering Breathless to “poverty row” studio Monogram Pictures, and in his Band of Outsiders he dared to throw away the nuts and bolts of traditional American crime movies, and kept only the passion, the sentiment, and the joy of movement he felt emanating from them. Would-be tough guys Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur plan and execute a robbery with their new-found girlfriend/gun moll Anna Karina, but this is hardly a traditional suspense film. The spontaneity and capriciousness of what they're doing—despite, or perhaps because of, its movie-like implausibility—is what the picture's about, and the effect of seeing these three enacting scenes from other movies and other lives while creating a screen legend of their own is like looking into one of those double sets of mirrors that reflects a reflection of a reflection, ad infinitum. This is, of course, what Godard himself has always been doing with his art—using his reverence for the cinema to spin riffs on genre films that both break them down into their basic elements while reverentially defending them against anyone who would deny their status as art. “To me style is just the outside of content,” Godard was quoted as saying, “and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together; they can't be separated.” It's a film—and a philosophy—that was adopted by another immense talent who refuses to dis the genre film, Quentin Tarantino, whose own production company, A Band Apart, is a playful variation on Bande à part, the French title of Band of Outsiders. The movie's based on Fool's Gold by American author Dolores Hitchens, and it was photographed by the great Raoul Coutard.

NEXT STOP … Pierrot le Fou, Going Places, Reservoir Dogs

1964 97m/B FR Sami Frey, Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Louisa Colpeyn; D: Jean-Luc Godard; W: Jean-Luc Godard; C: Raoul Coutard; M: Michel Legrand. VHS HTV, NOS, MRV