"Band of Outsiders" (1964)

There is an interesting tension in Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders. Godard intends it to be both hyper-real, true to life, and self-consciously unreal, self-aware it’s a film. At times these two intents overlap nicely; the film’s brilliant central conceit: what if one of those gangster heists films took place in real life with everything drolly ripped from everyday occurrence and concerned with all the mundane details. The gangster cool is stripped back, and what we get are two bumbling best friends who have seen more crimes committed in the movies than they have actually committed themselves. In its own way that ends up becoming its own sort of cool.

The would-be gangsters Franz (Sami Frey)and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) fall for the same girl Odile (Anna Karina, Godard's then-wife, who his obsessively frames and shoots) at an English class taught to French-speaking individuals. Both are also looking to make a big score and assume it will be as easy as in the movies. In an attempt to impress the older men doting on her, Odile offers up her home, stocked with a safe full of her father’s illegally earned cash. 

If the film has a problem, it isn't its commitment to the mundane; indeed, that's often charming. What is the film’s problem, rather, is due to Godard’s predilections: it is a film that, on some level, knows it’s a film, and its characters sort of know they’re fictional characters. Sometimes it feels like Godard has his head up his ass and is circling the rabbit-hole of his obsessions. Godard hadn’t quite hit critical capacity (in a few years’ time he would get firebrand political with his films and they’re often hard to watch). The "film as film" is intellectualized and politicized here, but Godard still lets it go down easy with a tonic of silly coquetry. There’s a deftly whimsical, low-key, screwy infectiousness to the film.

Band of Outsiders plays out in vignettes, and Godard takes time out to riff on expectations and to go on little digressions of fun non-sequiturs. There’s a robbery and a love triangle, but they’re just catalysts for improvisatory flights of fancy. Indeed, when nothing appears to be happening (even literally nothing during a humorous, literally silent minute of film where the characters test their willpower to not speak) that’s when the film is at its most delightful. 

Some of this hasn’t especially aged well. The films Outsiders is in conversation with are referenced with an unapologetic specificity, and the film is so very much of its own time, enamored with how clever it is being by breaking all the rules and getting away with it.

Yet the film’s central charm comes from having characters who wish their lives were more grandiose and epic, and a little less mundane. To say they know they’re film characters is imprecise; rather, they wish they were film characters. They play their part as if being swept along by the plot-that-be, because they imagine that’s they’re role. When things go wrong, it’s ironic, yes, but also tragic and a little pathetic. And yet it remains exceptionally funny because they’re in over their heads and refuse to admit it.

Grade: B+