Bando à Parte

Accessible Godard! Between the more famous "Breathless" and "Alphaville.." Godard wrote and directed this gem of French chic. The story is straight out of the tabloids, a love triangle of misfits who band together briefly but end up making a mess of things. But their moments together are oddly fascinating particularly an infectious dance sequence as all three do the Madison. It's worth watching the movie for this scene alone! The leads, including Jean-Luc Godard partner Anna Karina, are young and charming and their quick dialogue keeps things light. Yet the viewer remains detached throughout and ultimately is left with a sense of surrealism. A wonderful example of French "new wave" cinema, "Band a'part" is a delight. Voyez!

I must admit I have a bit of a problem with Jean Luc Godard. As he is a major influence on many film makers I love, I'm always curious to watch his movies to see where thay learned their chops. But I usually find Godard's movies a chore to get through and generally disappointing overall. Even his most famous and influential movie 'Breathless' took me a few viewings before I "got" it, and recently rewatching it for the first time on DVD I found it to be a lot less entertaining than I'd remembered. 'Band Of Outsiders' is for many Godard buffs even better than 'Breathless', but I really cannot share their enthusiasm. While in many ways the two movies are similar in approach and subject matter, the major difference for me is that 'Band Of Outsiders' lacks the infectious energy of 'Breathless'. Making a movie about characters who are bored with life there is a great risk that the movie will be boring to watch, and this is too often the case with this film. There are a few inspired sequences I can't deny that, especially the influential dancing scene, the minute of silence, and the race around the Louvre, but these are few and far between. The other main difference is in the actors themselves. Anna Karina is by far the best thing about this movie, but Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey lack the charisma and presence of Jean-Paul Belmondo, and drag the movie to a standstill every time they have a "bit". I'm sorry I just couldn't get into their characters or care for their fate, in the way I could about Belmondo and Seberg in Godard's earlier movie. So there you have it, a movie that buffs will probably want to check out for historical reasons, but apart from that there isn't much reason to sit through it. And yeah, I know it gets a big thumbs up from Quentin Tarantino, but so does 'Days Of Thunder'!

Band of Outsiders, from the novel by Dolores Hitchens, is a jazzy and poetic take on the modern crime film, with more successful sequences than I could have expected. Unlike in his debut, Breathless, here the characters - two young men Arthur (Claude Brasseur) & Franz (Sami Frey) and the young woman Odile (the beautiful Anna Karina) - are quite accessible (at the least watchable) to those who aren't used to Godard's treatments of his main players.

That, along with a style including artful but elegant and, in opposition, gritty and 'cool' cinematography by Raoul Coutard and a striking, upbeat musical score by Michel Legrand, gives Jean-Luc Godard the edge in creating one of the most influential films of the new-wave. Arthur and Franz are different personalities- you can notice the differences in the little moments- but they have a shared idea as being would-be petty criminals. Franz meets Odile in a writing class, and after much talk they hatch a plan to steal all the money that Odile's father has stolen from the government and kept inside her house. The film takes its time leading up to the robbery, which is like a two punch knockout that at first is astonishing and then following it by devastating.

What makes Band of Outsiders a great film is not just the last act, but that the lead up to it, the filler, is rather extraordinary in its good grace to keep the audience entertained even as they know they're watching an art film (a good analogy is that Godard narrates much like Cocteau narrated over Blood of a Poet, except that here it's over a crime instead of a series of surrealistic events). Such moments of note are the minute of silence (like in Week End's traffic scene the audience feels much like the characters amid the duration of the scene), the subtly light-hearted feel of the classroom scene, and most notably the Madison dance.

The Dance sequence, in which our three anti-heroes turn on the jukebox and give a dance number that immediately calls to mind as inspiration for Travolta and Thruman's number to Chuck Berry in Pulp Fiction. However, after seeing this number, I'm inclined to argue that the Madison is the better of the two. There are also little moments that are funny and/or fascinating, and they go to show there's more emotion in this triangle than would usually be found in any kind of conventional film-noir.

After now seeing four of his films (Breathless, Contempt, Week End, and Band of Outsiders), this is my favorite. A+ (on my first viewing)

Apart from perhaps being a satire of gangster movies, the point of this film eludes me. Two guys and a young woman plan a robbery at the Paris house where the young woman lives with her aunt. The young woman is naive and constantly scared. The two young men are seemingly rather ordinary. I didn't find any of these people interesting. We never learn much about them or what motivates them. Yet, given that this is a "New Wave" film I doubt that characterization was all that important to the film's director.

The plot starts out okay, but then meanders, and then becomes increasingly silly and unbelievable. Maybe that was intentional. Midway through, the three main characters suddenly, and for no reason, burst into a dance called the "Madison", the steps to which are nothing if not annoyingly repetitive. This bouncy little interlude goes on for some time, yet it has absolutely nothing to do with the story. Again, maybe that's the point.

Other gimmicks are inserted gratuitously, evidently to shock 1964 viewers into the realization, consistent with New Wave doctrine, that the film is not a product of the dreaded classical Hollywood narrative style of film-making.

But the worst element of this film is the sound. Background, ambient noise is amplified; why, I don't know, except, again, as some counterpoint to standard Hollywood films. Yet, the noise in "Band Of Outsiders" is so distracting, even grating, it takes away from what little value the visuals and narrative may have.

B&W cinematography is unremarkable. Lighting is low-contrast. Visuals trend toward grayish, pallid tones. Production design, in keeping with low-budget film-making, is plain, even cheap looking.

As a daring and iconoclastic attempt in 1964 to provide an alternative to stodgy, old-style Hollywood film-making, Godard's "Band Of Outsiders" probably does have some historical value. But what was visionary then seems campy and trite now.

Style over substance. It's an interesting approach to filmmaking, but it also stops the viewer from really caring about the characters. Director Jean-Luc Godard shows his talent for visuals and there are a number of scenes in the film that really stay in your mind. The story itself is not much engaging and there are no real thrills. What you will get is, perhaps, more of a reflection upon existence.