Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Blame it on the Madison.

Or blame it on Arthur, Franz, and Odile’s gleeful race through the Louvre in an attempt to break the world record (held by an American, of course) for the quickest visit ever.

Blame it on the minute of silence; the way that the director credits himself JEAN-LUC CINÉMA GODARD; the way our heroes pass under a stylish neon sign on the Place Clichy reading “Nouvelle Vague.”

But most of all, blame it on the Madison dance sequence, later to be quoted by a parade of hip directors, that Band of Outsiders first seems a film of gestures rather than a singular, coherent drama. Utterly seductive in its digressions, limned with Parisian nostalgia and metafilmic quips, it’s a movie for which the flimsy caper plot risks seeming pure pretext. “Un plan?” says Odile, turning directly to the camera: “Pourquoi?” Arrogantly sans souci, such a strategy could have stumbled—particularly for a director just off his first bomb, Les Carabiniers, and perhaps just as disconcertingly, the success of his CinemaScope stab at the mainstream, Le Mépris. But the gestures themselves are surefooted, and too seductively goofy to dislike. And not even the narrator (Godard himself) seems capable of taking the main action too seriously: “A few words chosen at random,” begins the underwhelming overture. “Three weeks earlier. A pile of money. An English class. A house by the river. A romantic girl.”

Sure, but what’s that against the infinitely charming terpsichorean savoir-faire of Arthur, Franz, and Odile? Godard claims to have invented the dance, but he didn’t, any more than he invented the quotes from Rimbaud, Breton, Eluard, Queneau, and the rest. It came from America.

Plenty came from America, of course—not just Dolores Hitchens’ source novel Fools’ Gold, republished in France as part of the famous pulp Série Noire. From Arthur and Franz’s playful opening reenactment of the death of Billy the Kid, to the Hollywood ending steaming off to South America between The Immigrant and Butch and Sundance, the players make their claim on French reality by playing American fantasy. It’s as if they aren’t characters at all—they just think they are, acting out a movie they saw, one Saturday afternoon, called America. In that language class where boys meet girl, someone asks, “How do you say ‘a big million dollar film’?”

For all of this, Bande à part (its French title) is a movie with a main motion—not of a noir or a policier, but a love story. Like so many Godard films, it’s a love story with a bullet in it. And like the most fiercely involved romances, it’s a map of difficult frontiers: between big city and still-rustic suburbs, prewar singularity and the masses of mass culture, between natural light and the color of money. Characters meet, notes the director, “at the crossroads of the unusual and the ordinary.” An encyclopedic litterateur, Godard recalls the sublime phrase of proto-Surrealist Raymond Roussel, envisioning the art of the new century as “the marriage of the beautiful and the trivial.”

That might describe all of Godard; certainly all the film’s characters. Still, beyond the vexed romance of Arthur, Odile, and Franz, there is a more encompassing love story. Shot by Raoul Coutard in a filtered black and white that renders the Bastille neighborhood flat and workaday, the suburban landscape charged and ghostly, Band of Outsiders is more than anything a melancholy love letter to Paris and to time. These are complicated relationships, to be sure. For the French New Wave, cultural nostalgia was conservative unto anathema. Godard was never in the business of stopping time, from his celebrated jump-cuts to the irrevocable destinies which sweep his characters before them. The movie doesn’t come to judge the future, but to marry it.

It was just as Billy the Kid was dying in America that factories started appearing on the outskirts of Paris. Still, the spectral, suburban landscape across which Karina makes a dash, gawky, nervy, and beautiful, could still exist in mythical time (“a prewar, poetic climate,” Godard called it) where she makes a hero’s journey over embankment and escarpment, complete with rowboat bridge. It was on the Grand Boulevards that cash had become king without even the niceties of a coronation.

That’s the secret justification for the amateur gang’s plan to rip off the promised pile of dough from the house where Odile lives with her adoptive aunt. We know the guy who has it stashed doesn’t deserve it. But beneath knowing, we sense the cash should be downtown reveling in the new consumer capitalism, not lying fallow stashed away on a suburban estate. It literally has no business being out there. No wonder Odile, when she sets her eyes on the money, stares at it like it’s artwork.

Or maybe she’s just used to the camera staring at her that way. Godard certainly had no problem filming Anna Karina—former model, current wife, with whom he had just formed Anouchka Films and from whom he would soon enough be divorced—as if she were a lovely object. Yet her impossibly direct style remains surprising and affecting. Claude Brasseur plays Arthur as a stylish cynic, an old type; Sami Frey is bemused and naive, a Cary Grant who has decided to start from the beginning, with an open heart. But Karina bears the desires of the New Wave in every move. As Godard intones, “Odile said she’d blurted it out but meant it.” The reference is to telling Arthur she loves him, but it might as well be an ars cinematica, the aesthetics of immediacy writ human. As we hear the phrase, Karina passes directly under that “Nouvelle Vague” neon.

None of them has a finer moment than the Madison, just a couple minutes during which each manages to telegraph everything you might need to know about them. If it’s a set piece, it’s also the heartbreaking heart of a total, complex movie; it makes a microhistory of the changes at stake. Godard must have been drawing not just on the dance brought to France by the Nicholas Brothers, but on Singin’ in the Rain’s title dance, the classic of boy-girl-boy choreography. That film too concerned moviemaking, industrial change, a bunch of singing and dancing on the border of two eras. But Godard sees in such a moment more complexity than a musical comedy would allow, or a grand tragedy for that matter. There’s something of both in the joy and alienation expressed equally in Arthur, Franz, and Odile’s dance, choreographed to bar jukebox and internal monologue. Never have three people been so alone together, a band and apart, in a singular double-exposure of one moment arriving as another passes away.

Categories: Film Essays