Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders is a rather shallow heist movie that nonetheless keeps our interest thanks to its mostly conventional character, its central tension and at least two delightful scenes of unbridled joy.
France
3.5*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard
Running time: 95 minutes
Original title: Bande à part
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the crime [sic]. In Band of Outsiders, two guys and a girl they both pine for attempt to steal a cupboard full of money with no real preparation to speak of. Usually, the movies get away with pretending that anyone can be a supercriminal, but Godard shows, in his usual light-hearted way, how deceptive such (and other) representations can be.
In what may be one of the director’s most conventional storylines, the film follows two best friends, Franz and Arthur, who both take a fancy to a girl in their English class, Odile. As usual with early Godard, Anna Karina plays Odile, a wide-eyed girl with a hint of a foreign accent but whose origins are never made explicit. Here, she comes close to being a timid damsel in distress who makes the mistake of mentioning to the boys that her uncle is hiding a stash of money in his cupboard. Despite her initial trepidation, she soon relents and joins in hatching a plan to steal what could easily amount to millions of francs.
But instead of spending time planning their first heist, the trio of more or less first-time criminals has too much fun, albeit frequently to the viewer’s amusement since the plot is so thin. “We’ll make a plan!” Arthur tells Odile. “A plan?” asks Odile, suddenly looking straight at the camera. “Why?” This is one of the multiple strategies that the director deploys to destabilise the conventional grammar of film, with varying degrees of success. It is a Godard production, after all.
First, he is the narrator, conveying a few remarks with his trademark lisp and complete lack of emotion. While some of these observations are literary devices and unnecessary (e.g. he describes the state of mind of his characters), others are playful and short enough to be effective (e.g. when, 10 minutes into the film, he briefly recaps the first few scenes for those members of the audience who arrived late to the screening). Second, he cuts the music on the soundtrack while keeping other diegetic sounds and inserts his own thoughts on the voice-over. And third, he removes all sound for a “moment of silence”, which shows how a simple gimmick (like the black page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) can go a long way. But he also goes over the top with his opening credits by replacing the writer-director attribution with a megalomaniacal “JEANLUC CINÉMA GODARD” credit. *groan*
In the English class, which somehow has a teacher who only reads to her students in French, the work being studied is Romeo and Juliet – specifically, the scene where Juliet decides to take her own life after finding her lover poisoned and dead. As with his previous film, Contempt, Godard seems to signal very clearly right at the start where his film is ultimately headed. In Contempt, he sought to compare his characters to the mythical couple of Ulysses and Penelope (with him, presumably, taking the role of Homer). Here, he appears to see himself through Bard-tinted glasses, although as the narrator, he also pretends to be the writer of a pulp novel, with this being one in a series of tales.
But despite its literary aspirations and its alienation devices, like when the characters break the fourth wall, the people we see here are all surprisingly human. The moments we spend with them are full of tenderness and timidity, giddiness and uncertainty, joyousness and spontaneity. Arguably the film’s most famous scene, closely related to Karina’s equally affecting performance in a bar in My Life to Live, has Odile, Franz and Arthur gleefully dance the Madison in an unbroken take over nearly four minutes.
For the most part, however, despite bursts of unbridled joy that include the threesome running through the Louvre and upsetting the guardians of classical art along the way, Band of Outsiders never tries to go deeper than the surface. The relationships between all three characters and, in some cases, their families, go wholly undeveloped. We don’t even see Odile’s uncle, the target of the heist, until one of the final scenes, and the ending itself is protracted and weak. Moreover, the multitude of literary references, from Arthur’s surname being Rimbaud to Franz reading an extraordinarily pointless story by André Breton in full while they’re out driving, will almost certainly lead to eye-rolls from the audience.
But for those who generally find Godard’s style off-putting and self-indulgent, the restraint and adherence to conventional storytelling he shows here, while still far from smooth, will be a pleasant surprise to most viewers.