Godard: Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders) (1964)

It often feels as if the wilder and woollier Jean-Luc Godard’s films become, the more they’re trying to distract us from an undercurrent of malaise, ennui and plain simple boredom with a Parisian cityscape that, try as it might, can never equal the thrills of American cinema. That’s particularly acute in Bande à Part, a heist film in which the heist is completely peripheral or eerily omniscient, depending on how you look at it. Centring on a trio of drifters – Odile (Anna Karina), Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) – who meet at an English language class, the first half of the film is more or less plotless, alternating between cramped, cupboard-like spaces and chaotic Parisian intersections, prison-like stairwells and long, sinuous stretches of street, until it feels as if the whole tone and texture of the classical heist, its counterpoint between constriction and surveillance, is all there already in Godard’s depictions of Paris itself. Against that backdrop, the trio’s antics gradually crystallise around creating scenarios and situations to escape from – most famously in their effort to break the record for running through the Louvre – culminating with their decision to rob Odile’s aunt’s house, a sprawling mansion that was once presumably in the countryside, but has now been overtaken by the industrial outskirts of the city. Bouncing back and forth between the city and the city limits, Godard taps into the same ghostly urban sprawl as Louis Feuillade’s Vampires, though this time around its endless permutations are more comic than horrific – a seemingly endless series of word-games, newspaper articles, headlines, quotations, voiceovers and other textual fragments that makes it feel a bit like Godard discards a possible film with each street he passes, each utterance he lets go, oversaturating Paris with such a surfeit of cinematic tropes and tics that the characters themselves feel more like a series of half-remembered traits than characters in themselves. Situated in a weird elastic zone between cinema and reality, the film finally feels a bit like its own venue, less a depiction than a fragment of a New Wave Paris in which cinematic experience has spilled out of the theatres and percolated through one windscreen after another, pooling and eddying around Karina’s luminous face, and defying Godard to share even one or two things he knows about her.