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Band of Outsiders - Criterion CollectionRating:
Release Date: 07 January, 2003 Retail Price: $29.95 OUR Price: $26.99 You SAVE: $2.96! Cast: |
Band of Outsiders - Criterion Collection Reviews
Godard at his best!
Clearly Godard's camera is in love with Anna Karina and this instructs the entire film. That face: Those big almond shaped eyes; innocent, curious, mysterious, mischievous. Odele caught in the prison of her budding sexuality. Oscar and Alex stuck in a web with her, each trapped for different reasons, but all three caught in a struggle manipulated by the puppet master, Godard. "Three weeks earlier, a pile of money. An English class. A house by the river. A romantic girl." A story as improbable as the "legend" of Billy the Kid! This film is derived out of a mixture of boredom, desire and desperation from a filmmaker at odds between love and revulsion of Americana and the cinematic experience in general. One often wonders if making movies is Godard's guilty pleasure. Rather than construct a story, he often seems more interested in deconstruction. His Paris is visually stark and cold, but there is also much beauty. Sadness and beauty: "it all depends upon how you frame the picture." Again I fall back to Odele/Karina. Odele is constantly reinventing herself, bouncing from sensation to sensation and Oscar, Alex and even the director himself are trying to grab hold, but she's far too illusive - even for the puppet master! Godard is in love with Odele/Karina and this is infectious. He is also in love with Paris and American movies and cannot help it. An intellectual trying desperately to reign in his emotions but failing brilliantly. This is why "Band of Outsiders" succeeds so well. There is much more at work in this film than Godard merely trying to be clever; the moment of silence, the "Madison" dance sequence, the Louvre world record. There is a welcome spontaneity fused together with impeccable technique. A scene in the film that is particularly instructive takes place with all three characters in an English class. As the teacher reads the death scene from Romeo and Juliet, the three star crossed lovers seem oblivious to the words, and yet the emotion behind the words seem to color their actions. They are creating their own love story of sorts - but it is a story that lives and breathes inside a movie, where even tragedy is tempered by that good old American "happy ending".
Daring and playful
Arthur and Franz are an amoral pair who have enlisted the naive Odile in a scheme to steal from her wealthy aunt in this playful French homage to the American genre of film noir. Although the traditional structure is present--small-time criminals get in over their heads and meet with tragedy--director Jean-Luc Godard does not choose the earnest emphasis on plot that usually distinguishes such material. He strips the "plot" to its bare essentials--three people are going to burglarize a house--and, as if to acknowledge that such characters could never exist in the real world, he presents them as existentially-challenged, melancholy misfits who lack a sense of connection with the everyday world and amuse themselves with impromptu breaks with reality such as an spontaneous dance in a cafe, a race through the Louvre to see everything in the shortest possible time, and pantomimed gunfights in the street. This film walks a fine line between inviting both contempt for the unsympathetic characters as well as delight at the liberties Godard takes with the conventions of film and his chosen genre./
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