Band of Outsiders Reviews

Several years after the success of his debut feature, BREATHLESS, Godard returned to the crime genre and his fascination with American pop culture. Outsiders less by choice than by societal pressures, Odile (Karina), Arthur (Brasseur), and Franz (Frey) meet in an English language class and become fast friends. Odile tells Franz that she lives in a house where a large cache of loot is hidden, and soon he and Arthur, under the influence of the countless Hollywood films and pulp novels they've consumed, decide to burglarize the house. Odile, attracted to both men, completes the criminal triangle. As anyone who has seen a Godard film might guess, there is very little concern for plot--the attraction of BAND OF OUTSIDERS lies not so much in its actual story as in Godard's telling of it. His voice-over narration is confrontational; his characters talk to the screen; there exists a strange, somewhat uneasy relationship between comedy and violence; and the frame is filled with various allusions to film, literature, and Godard himself. This was his seventh film in only five years and, as in Truffaut's SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, it attempts to find a new truth by retelling a familiar story in a new way. Particularly memorable is the trio's nine-second tour of the Louvre. If this film is less engaged with social and political realities than most of Godard's other work from this period and seems like nothing more than a playful attempt to re-create an old Hollywood genre, one must remember that even a lesser Godard is likely to be much more stimulating than another director's better films. At the height of his impish self-awareness, the filmmaker credits himself here as Jean-Luc Cinema Godard.