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By PAUL BRENNER
Notoriously unavailable on video except for wretched, unwatchable dubs, Jean-Luc
Godard's 1964 meditation (and mediation) on B movie crime dramas -- "Band of Outsiders (Bande a part)" -- was truly "a
film found on a scrap heap." But now under the watchful eye of Godard's master cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, this
early Godard has been given a lustrous second life in a newly restored addition to The Criterion Collection.
Based on Dolores Hitchens's Crime Club novel, Fools' Gold, the film concerns two Parisian lowlifes (Claude Brasseur and
Sami Frey) who take up with an overage French schoolgirl (the exquisite Anna Karina) to rob a cache of loot hidden in
her aunt's house. As is usually the case with Godard, the story itself is ultimately superfluous -- the tale's sardonic
narrator, Godard himself, brushes away the plot with a curt "A pile of money. An English class. A house by a river. A
romantic girl." Less concerned with narrative originality than with new ways to tell a two-bit tale, Godard turns his
characters into walking (although unaware) repositories of an uneneding stream of literary and popular culture allusions
(an collection of insouciant character traits eagerly lapped up years late by Quentin Tarantino, whose production
company bears the telling moniker of A Band Apart). Less bitter and more melancholy about cultural loss than he would be
a scant three years later with his incendiary "Weekend," "Band of Outsiders" is perhaps the last Godard film of a
non-partisan digitalis exegesis. It is also joyful spur-of-the-moment cinema, heralded at the start by Godard's beloved
cacophonic sounds of Paris traffic. The unfettered immediacy of such seeming instantaneous occurrences as Brasseur and
Frey trading off reading tabloid news items aloud, a wild dash through the Louvre, and a lengthy "moment of silence"
when the soundtrack cuts completely out is pure, impish Godard. The most joyous and most telling set piece of all is the
impromptu jukebox dance in a cafe when Brasseau, Karina, and Frey dance the Madison. Dancing beside one another but
alone, Godard shows the characters stuck in their own separate spheres, cut from both each other and themselves.
In a section called The Loot, Criterion offers a number of fascinating extras. A visual glossary offers a key to most of
the literary, pop, and movie references in the film. A short film from 1964 features a brief interview with Godard and
behind-the-scenes footage of Godard during the filming of "Band of Outsiders." There are two recent interviews with Anna
Karina and Raoul Coutard, along with two trailers for the film. The nuttiest of all is "Les Fiancés Du Pont MacDonald,"
an extract from Agnes Varda's "Cleo From 5 to 7" in which Godard and Karina flutter around a Paris setting in an
unsettling parody of a silent film comedy. Unsettling because not only does Godard appear rail-thin in a seersucker suit
and a straw hat but he also vows to cast his dark glasses into the Seine forever to prove his love to Anna. Only in the
movies. |
