Band of Outsiders is Jean-Luc Godard at his lightest: a crime story drawn from an American pulp novel and played as a game. Two aimless young men, Franz and Arthur, both circling Anna Karina's Odile, talk her into helping them rob the villa where she lives. The plot is almost beside the point. What the film is remembered for are its digressions — the trio dancing the Madison in a café, their record-breaking dash through the Louvre, and a minute of silence in which Godard cuts the soundtrack to nothing. Godard narrates it himself, quoting the gangster pictures it half-imitates. It is the most charming film of his years with Karina.
Godard took an American crime novel — Dolores Hitchens's Fools' Gold — and drained it of suspense. Franz and Arthur are two young men in love with English lessons and Hollywood gangster movies; Odile is the girl they meet in class, living in a suburban villa where a lodger has left a pile of money. The two talk her into helping them steal it.
The heist barely matters. Godard keeps interrupting it — with his own voice on the soundtrack summarizing the characters' thoughts, with detours and jokes, with quotations from the crime films the men are imitating. The result treats genre as something to play with rather than a plot to obey.
Three scenes made the film famous. In a café the trio breaks into the Madison, a line dance, while Legrand's music drops out and back and Godard reads their private thoughts aloud. Then they agree to a minute of silence, and Godard cuts the film's sound to total silence — which lasts, in fact, only about half a minute.
And they run the length of the Louvre, trying to beat an invented record for sprinting through the museum; the narrator clocks them at nine minutes forty-three. The three passages have almost nothing to do with the plot and are the reason the film is loved — pure play, self-aware and light.
Anna Karina's Odile is the film's center of gravity, caught between the two men and never quite committed to the crime. Karina, Godard's wife, gives the film its warmth, and the movie treats her with the same fond attention Godard brought to all their work together.
The robbery, when it comes, goes wrong: most of the money has been moved, and the amateur break-in turns deadly — Arthur is shot and killed. Franz and Odile get away with what little they find and set off together, the narrator waving them toward South America and a sequel that never came.
Band of Outsiders became one of the most imitated of Godard's films. Its café dance has been copied for decades, and Quentin Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart after it. A 2001 re-release and a later restoration kept it in circulation.
It endures because it is the friendliest demonstration of the New Wave's central idea — that cinema could be about cinema, that genre was a toy, and that a film could stop its own story to dance.
1958
Dolores Hitchens publishes the crime novel Fools' Gold, the film's loose source.
early 1964
Godard shoots the film quickly in and around a wintry Paris with Raoul Coutard and his regular company.
5 August 1964
Bande à part is released in France.
2001
A US re-release from Rialto Pictures renews the film's reputation; Quentin Tarantino's company is named A Band Apart in its honor.
2010s
A high-definition restoration underlies the Criterion edition, keeping the film in the repertory.
Two young men, Franz and Arthur, both drawn to Odile, talk her into helping them rob the villa where she lives. Jean-Luc Godard directed it in 1964 from an American crime novel, but plays the story lightly, as a game full of digressions. Anna Karina plays Odile.
Three: the Madison line dance the trio performs in a café; the minute of silence, when Godard cuts the soundtrack to nothing (it actually lasts about half a minute); and the run through the Louvre, where the characters try to beat an invented record for sprinting through the museum.
The robbery goes wrong — most of the money has been moved, and the amateur break-in turns violent. Arthur is shot and killed; Franz and Odile escape with what little they find and set off together, the narrator sending them toward South America.
Quentin Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart after this film, whose French title is Bande à part. He has cited it as a favorite, and the film's café dance has been widely imitated.
Yes — it is one of Godard's most beloved films of the movement, and its lightest. Its self-aware narration, genre play, and digressions that stop the plot to dance are the New Wave's methods at their most charming.
Band of Outsiders — trailer (Rialto Pictures)
Associated with · 1964
Godard's lightest film of the movement: an American crime plot played as a game, with self-aware narration and digressions — the Madison dance, the Louvre run, the minute of silence — that stop the story to play.
