In using the title for Macado de Assis's novel as my summary for this particular Godard film, i'm trying to bring up the fact that this is a post-modern narrative, with the narrator (Godard himself) constantly breaking into the action to give us (the audience) not just an idea of what's going on, but to clue us into feelings and ideas that his characters (Franz, Arthur and Odile) can barely express. Yes, a lot of people who are really devoted to Godard's cinema as one of innovation and technical accomplishment often overlook this film, but this is one of the most directly emotional of Godard's early films, an elegy about loneliness and the desire to live life like the movies. For many of us who saw it in the 1960s, it seemed to sum up the way we sat around and wished we were in a movie we "secretly wanted to live" (to quote from Godard's MASCULINE FEMININE). It may not be as technically dazzling as ALPHAVILLE or WEEKEND, but BAND OF OUTSIDERS is a contradictory movie: photographically, the black-and-white images of the suburbs of Paris are often delicately mournful, and Michel LeGrand's music is wistful, yet it's a film filled with love, love for movies, love for its leading lady, Anna Karina, and love for the audience, whom Godard is always addressing.
Review of Band of Outsiders
