The Outsiders = Bande a part

There is a girl and two men with a gun. The girl is going out with one man but falls in love with another. They plan a robbery. The robbery goes wrong. One of the men dies. The plot is schematic, based on Dolores Hitchen’s pulp crime novel “Fool’s Gold”, but in this enormously influential modernist film, Godard is less interested in the genre tropes of the thriller narrative than he is in using the grammar of cinema to explore the existential and romantic concerns of his time and place. So, amongst the cheap gun play and B-movie eroticism, there are quotes from Shakespeare and from Le Figaro’s analysis of the massacres in Rwanda; a character’s father is Arthur Rimbaud and Anna Karina’s face becomes the catalyst for some of cinema’s most romantic enthusings on beauty and on love. “Bande A Part” saw a young Godard begin to explore both the philosophical and plastic possibilities of cinema, and to begin his playful experimentation with sound and vision which was to make him the world’s most influential film director. His influence can still be seen in the recurrent use of moments and scenes from “Band A Part” in contemporary film-making: Hal Hartley punkishly re-invented the dance sequence from this movie in his “Simple Men”; Quentin Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart. The crisp black and white cinematography is by Raoul Coutard, the elegant music by Michel Legrand. Alongside Karina, the film stars Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur. Decades may have passed since it was first made, but seeing this movie still feels like drinking from the elixir of youth. In French with English subtitles.