Band Of Outsiders

I finally got to see a film this weekend that I've read about for years: Jean-Luc Godard's Band Of Outsiders (Bande à part).



The film's plot concerns a young woman named Odile, who meets two dodgy characters in her English class, Arthur and Franz. Before the movie starts, she has told them that she lives in a villa outside of Paris with her aunt and a boarder who has a lot of money stashed in a cupboard in his room. Naturally, they hatch a plan to steal it.

But the plot of Band Of Outsiders is secondary to Godard's stylistic pranks and loose, naturalistic storytelling. Godard said he wanted to do things in this movie that "you weren't supposed to do." Things like:

• During a sequence where the three characters are dancing in a cafe, the director occasionally stops the music and tells us, in voiceover, what each of the three is thinking at that moment.
  
  
• When Franz suggests that a minute of silence can feel like a VERY long time, Odile insists they try it. The soundtrack goes silent, and the characters sit, fidgeting, for a minute. (Actually, I think it's less than a minute, but it feels longer!)
  
  
• When one of the men says, early on, that they will hatch a plan to steal the money, Odile responds, "Un plan?" Then she looks directly at the camera and asks, "Pourquoi? (Why?)"

This is only the second Godard film I've seen, my first being the intriguing but nearly impenetrable Alphaville , which I have since read is a bad place for a Godard beginner to start. (No wonder I was so baffled by it.) After seeing Band Of Outsiders, though, I really want to give some more of Godard's films a look.