Event

Band of Outsiders

Four years after Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard reimagined the gangster film even more radically with Band of Outsiders (Bande à part). In it, two restless young men (Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) enlist the object of both of their fancies (Anna Karina) to help them commit a robberyin her own home. This audacious and wildly entertaining French New Wave gem is at once sentimental and insouciant, effervescently romantic and melancholy, and it features some of Godards most memorable set pieces, including the headlong race through the Louvre and the unshakably cool Madison dance sequence.

"Karina is, like Louise Brooks, one of those pure creatures of the movies, so direct and piercing that she transcends the limits of technology and the chasm of decades." - Charles Taylor, Village Voice

A reverie of a gangster movie!" Pauline Kael

"Band of Outsiders shows Godard at his most amusing, and that is no small thing. Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

"Its no surprise that, as shot by the great Raoul Coutard, the movie is beautiful. But its the bleakest sort of beauty: winter-bare trees, the perishing and deserted streets of the Parisian exurbs, shabby cafés and lodgings This is a world apart from the way so many contemporary movies riff on and ironically fetishize our cinematic past. Godard works at an affectionate distance that allows him to comment on his characters naïveté but still close enough that he can hear their hearts break." - Village Voice

"Theres much more to the film than that impetuously romantic surface that fans like Quentin Tarantino and Hal Hartley immediately remember. That is not to say it doesnt deserve its reputation as one of Godards warmest and most widely appealing movies Band of Outsiders hews closer to the template of his groundbreaking 1960 debut Breathless in marrying a comprehensible plot with riffs on popular genres and fairly fleshed-out characters, all marinated in his distinctly cool modernist style." Kenji Fujishima, Movie Mezzanine