[yasr_overall_rating]
Two crooks with a fondness for old Hollywood B-movies convince a languages student to help them commit a robbery.
“We can’t forget: classic equals modern. Everything that is new is automatically traditional.” – from “Band of Outsiders.”
One could write an essay detailing cinema audiences’ waning attention spans, based on the majority of films currently being produced, identical in structure (it’s reassuring when you know what’s coming) and pacing (it gets boring when a shot lasts longer than 10 seconds). While certain older films remain ageless, somehow having managed to transcend space and time and still captivate audiences just as powerfully as they did when they came out (“The Wages of Fear,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Exorcist,” most of Hitchcock’s oeuvre all come to mind), a friend of mine, for example, had trouble sitting through the first five minutes of Nicolas Roeg’s classic “Don’t Look Now.”
I tried to explain to him that without Roeg’s horror masterpiece, there would be no “American Horror Story,” and how it inspired Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later,” and the effect it had on cinematographer Anthony Don Mantle when he was shooting Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist”…But by the time I was finished waxing poetic, he was deep in his iPhone, Instagramming my cats to a friend. It’s really rather incredible how films have sped up the pace, and how folks either forget, or are clueless, that most of them are just regurgitating masterpieces, at twice the speed, to pander to our rapidly-growing collective ADD.
That is frustrating for many reasons. People may be hooked on Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” – one of my favorite films, mind you – but few are aware that the dance sequence in that film is almost directly lifted from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 masterpiece “Band of Outsiders,” or that Tarantino named his company “A Band Apart” as an ode to this defining classic of the French New Wave movement. Fewer yet would force themselves to watch a black-and-white artistic gangster flick from the 1960s – which is too bad, as the film is more suspenseful, witty and clever than 99% of the crap floating into theaters today. Both in their early 30s, Godard and Tarantino each made a masterpiece that changed cinema forever – the exception being, Godard’s stuff was 100% original and forgotten by all but the true cinefiles among us.
Described by the auteur himself as “‘Alice in Wonderland’ meets Franz Kafka” (legendary critic Pauline Kael referred to it as such as well), “Band of Outsiders” is one of the seven collaborations between the adventurous filmmaker and his star – and then wife – Anna Karina, whom he first spotted in a modeling ad. After turning down the lead in the director’s classic debut “Breathless,” due to the nudity involved, Karina was convinced by an obsessed Godard to star in his second feature, “Le Petit Soldat,” which in turn led to the 5-year collaboration between them, up until their divorce in 1965.
There are no hints of the upcoming separation in “Band of Outsiders,” Godard’s infatuation with Karina (and filmmaking) very much evident in the way he shoots her, Raoul Coutard’s camera tenderly caressing her soft features, large eyes and full, luscious lips. Yes, “Band of Outsiders” is highly erotic, in the subtlest of ways. (Side note: sometimes, watching the sexual innuendos in, say, Hitchcock’s classics, just reiterates the point that “less is more,” and a few words and glances can be much more arousing than a graphic portrayal of coitus – unless, of course, it’s “Showgirls” we’re talking about.)
From the first minute, during the rollicking, jazzy credit sequence, Godard thrusts a zippy montage in our faces, meshing the three main characters – Odile (Karina), Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey) – together, making it clear that they are One, a Team, a Band. We then follow Arthur and Franz, two stylish, albeit underprivileged, young French men and B-movie lovers, as they drive through Paris, on their way to the house they are planing to rob. They exchange sparse remarks, again bringing to mind the opening sequence in “Pulp Fiction,” with Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vega (John Travolta) getting all lyrical about Big Macs, prior to shooting some gangsters. Only instead of fast food chains and foot massages, the main subject of Arthur and Franz’s conversation is Odile, the men’s playful rivalry taking precedence over their upcoming heist.
While we follow them, Arthur’s narration sparsely, but helpfully, catches us up with the plot: “For latecomers arriving now, we offer a few words chosen at random: Three weeks earlier. A pile of money. An English class. A house by the river. A romantic girl.” Having met the gorgeous Odile in class, Franz learned about the stash of money in her aunt’s house, and the trio hatches a plan to steal it – only love comes in the way, as it tends to, Arthur’s uncle gets involved, and things go horribly awry.
If that sounds like a flimsy plot, it does so for two reasons: I purposefully oversimplified it to let you discover the twists and turns of this 90-minute roller-coaster ride yourself, and the film is not so much about the plot, as it is about the style, the performances, the tiny nuances and graceful moments peppered throughout the story: the trio exchanging looks and notes in class, as their teacher recites a tragic passage from “Romeo and Juliet” (premonition!); the consequent semi-improvisational dialogue between the uber-confident Arthur and naive Odile by the stairs, so sexually charged it almost climaxes; Arthur and Franz reading grim obituaries, while an excited Odile rushes over to meet them; Odile’s hesitation, barely perceptible in the reflection of a restaurant mirror; or the remarkable sequence where the trio break “the record set by Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco,” by running through the Louvre in 9 minutes and 43 seconds, as practice for the heist. And of course, there’s the impromptu dance sequence, worth the price of admission alone, with its groovy soundtrack, highly stylized dancing and narrative interruptions. Pure brilliance.
Anna Karina exemplifies both innocence and boiling sexuality and playfulness; Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey, whom Godard called “Belmondo’s suburban cousins,” are the embodiment of “cool.” Their acting complements the style, and vice versa: it’s a symbiotic relationship wherein they feed off each other, an organic, fluid synthesis. A great example of this is a scene where Arthur and Odile share a joyous moment, walking down dimly-lit Parisian streets and squares, their love for each other palpable, as the narration wistfully comments: “It brought them back to the present, the past, and their intrepid future. Whereupon they went down into the center of the earth” – and the couple descends into a subway, where Odile half-sings, half-recites a poem, through the screeching of the train, directly into the camera.
“Band of Outsiders” is one of the purest examples of the French New Wave movement and what it represented: defying conventional narrative structure with offbeat editing choices, non-sequiturs, a poetic narration (“Vegetation invaded the desolate prospect, its blackness recalling the Sea of the Dead”), the balancing act of objective and subjective realism, and a certain…coolness that was indispensable to those films. The characters are rascals, smoking and goofing off, but they also whiff of menace, and you kinda want to be them – another trait Tarantino frivolously adopted in pretty much all of his films.
Godard’s film is about love: love of life, film, people; it’s about ugly betrayal, the sweet (and swift) magic of youth, friendship and trust; it’s a thriller, a comedy, a drama, a cautionary tale (that “happy ending” is one of the most acute and hilarious commentaries on the perils of living out a film fantasy ever committed to celluloid) and a heist flick, all seamlessly packed in one. There’s a reason a master filmmaker like Bernardo Bertolucci paid an ode to “Band of Outsiders” in “The Dreamers,” its 1960s-set story focusing on two young men and a young woman, also obsessed with film, life and each other. “Band of Outsiders” will linger in your mind, and you’ll keep coming back to it to discover new things about it, just as a generation of filmmakers did (by utilizing its most profound elements).
“Band of Outsiders” is alive, each shot blistering with originality and passion; it’s filmmaking at its most exuberant, and it still feels fresh, innovative, pulsating with more energy than a dozen “Transporters.” It also happens to be Godard’s most accessible, least experimental work, which should render it at least somewhat digestible for the current generation of filmgoers hooked on “guarding the galaxy.”
And yes, “Band of Outsiders” contains a minute-long scene of silence (the soundtrack cuts off, and the silence actually lasts about 40 seconds) between the three main characters, filled with tension, the storm of emotions subtle yet palpable…to those of us who seek it. I assume audiences jaded on Marvel will find this sequence – and the entire film, in fact – borderline-unwatchable. To them, I’d like to echo Franz’s sentiment, who interrupts the silence at the end of Godard’s famous sequence with the simple words: “That’s enough.” Put away your iPads and revisit this classic, guys. You may learn a thing or two.
Opens theatrically in New York (Film Forum) on May 6th
