Bande à Part [Band of Outsiders] *** (1964, Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, Danièle Girard) – Classic Movie Review 3638

Writer-director Jean-Luc Godard’s relatively low-scoring 1964 French New Wave thriller has cult chic status and lively stars in Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey as petty crooks living out their fantasies of planning a robbery.

Franz (Frey) meets languages student Odile (Karina) in an English class and she mentions that M Stolz keeps a pile of 10,000 franc notes unlocked in his room. Franz tells his friend Arthur (Brasseur) and, mimicking Hollywood B-movie tough guys, they case the house, and convince Odile to help them commit a burglary.

Annoyingly, the director is not remotely interested in his thriller plot, treating it all loftily like one huge.post-modern in-joke. And he has not really enough to offer that’s sufficiently interesting to say about his characters or their Paris milieu and way of life to compensate.

It ends up like a pale copy of his Breathless (1960) but without the free-wheeling freshness or charming stars. However, cinematographer Raoul Coutard and composer Michel Legrand make it look (black and white) and sound great, and the Madison dance sequence is cute, while Karina has her allure too.

Also in the cast are Daniéle Girard, Louisa Colpeyn, Chantal Darget, Georges Staquet, Ernest Menzer, Jean-Claude Rémoleux and Michel Delahaye.

Godard’s screenplay is based on the novel Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens. The director voices the narration.

Quentin Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart after this film.

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© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3638
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