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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Like "Breathless," this lovely and tender early work from Jean-Luc Godard is a reimagined gangster film.
Aug 17, 2001 | "He wondered if the world was becoming a dream or if a dream was becoming the world." That typically poetic line of Jean-Luc Godard's narration can stand for the bewildered and melancholy mood of his 1964 "Band of Outsiders" ("Bande à parte"), which has just been beautifully restored and rereleased by Rialto Pictures in a version that will be making its way around the country in the next few months. Perhaps Godard's loveliest movie, certainly his tenderest and most accessible, "Band of Outsiders" can seem no less strange than his more difficult films. Like many of Godard's characters, the two boys and a girl (it seems wrong to refer to them as men and women) at the center of the film want to live life as if it were a movie.
That may no longer appear to be so novel at a time when every crevice of our existence seems dominated by the media. Today movies themselves seem about nothing so much as other movies. The easiest way to get a picture made in Hollywood today is to sell it as another version of something audiences have already made a big success. ("It's 'Speed' on a hovercraft!" "It's 'Gladiator' in outer space!") So, self-consciously aping or parodying pictures we've all seen, playing to audiences who have become savvy about the way movies are hyped and how they attempt to manipulate us, today's movies often feel like nothing to take very seriously. (Part of the excitement over "Apocalypse Now Redux" may be hunger, among critics and moviegoers both, for a movie that wanted to be more than just another movie. But then, that film was made by a filmmaker of a generation for whom movies were never "just movies.")
Even for Godard in 1964, a story about three characters who desire an existence defined by the movies wasn't exactly a new idea. His first picture, 1959's "Breathless," was, like "Band of Outsiders," a reimagined version of an American gangster film. In "Breathless," Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg are cynical and worn out, trying on identities and attitudes, and discarding them as soon as they have outlived their use. The would-be robbers of "Band of Outsiders" aren't that world-weary. They're painfully susceptible to their pulp fantasies, lacking even the slim opportunities, and even the limited awareness, of the young boho intellectuals and would-be pop stars of Godard's 1966 "Masculine-Feminine." It's easy to imagine them in a few years, settling down to service jobs, all of their fantasies ground out of them.
The story of "Band of Outsiders" -- two boys (Claude Brasseur's Arthur and Sami Frey's Franz) meet a girl (Anna Karina's Odile) in their English class, learn from her that there's a cache of money in the villa where she lives with her aunt, and plan to steal it -- is a thorough product of the movies. (It was taken from the American pulp novel "Fool's Gold" by Dolores Hitchens.) And no one has ever been more self-conscious about reminding audiences they're watching a movie than Godard. At various times, his characters address us directly, and before they put their big plan into motion, the director himself tells us that they waited for nightfall, in homage to B-movies.
But "Band of Outsiders" is never "just a movie" for the simple reason that Godard never loses sight of the larger world. And though they would like to, neither do his characters. There's a yawning chasm between their dreams of gangster glory and the shabby reality of their lives. Shot on location in Paris, the movie is concretely grounded in the world of the metro and of billboards, of discount shops and cafes. To the accompaniment of Michel Legrand's understated and melancholy score, Godard and his cinematographer, the great Raoul Coutard, use the bleak late winter light (the film was shot in February and March) to give us a cold, gray Paris of perpetually overcast skies and trees denuded of leaves.
