Band of Outsiders

Godard shot Bande à part in twenty-five days in the winter of 1964, between Contempt and A Married Woman, adapting an American pulp novel by Dolores Hitchens. He described it later as the film of his that people liked, said in the tone of a man slightly puzzled by the fact. It is the lightest thing in the run of masterpieces he made in that decade, and the most imitated.

Franz and Arthur, two young men whose entire education has come from gangster films, meet Odile in an English class in the suburbs and learn there is money in the villa where she lives. The robbery is the excuse. What the film is actually about is the three of them killing time: the minute of silence in the café that Godard cuts the soundtrack for, the Madison danced in line, the sprint through the Louvre in nine minutes and forty-three seconds to beat a record set by an American. Raoul Coutard shot it in flat winter light, and Anna Karina, in her fifth film for Godard, is the reason it holds.

The Louvre run and the dance have been quoted so often — by Bertolucci, by Tarantino, whose production company took its name from the film — that it can be hard to see them fresh. Underneath the play is a genuine melancholy about young people who have replaced their lives with films, which is a subject Godard understood from the inside.