Jean-Luc Godard’s BAND OF OUTSIDERS is back for another week at Film Forum (photo courtesy Film Forum/Rialto Pictures)
BANDE A PART (BAND OF OUTSIDERS) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 7-13, 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30 (no shows September 11)
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
When a pair of disaffected Parisians, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), meet an adorable young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), in English class, they decide to team up and steal a ton of money from a man living in Odile’s aunt’s house. As they meander through the streets of cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s black-and-white Paris, they talk about English and wealth, dance in a cafe while director Jean-Luc Godard breaks in with voice-over narration about their character, run through the Louvre in record time, and pause for a near-moment of pure silence. Godard throws in plenty of commentary on politics, the cinema, and the bourgeoisie in the midst of some genuinely funny scenes. Band of Outsiders is no ordinary heist movie; based on Dolores Hitchens’s novel Fool’s Gold, it is the story of three offbeat individuals who just happen to decide to attempt a robbery while living their strange existence, as if they were outside from the rest of the world. The trio of ne’er-do-wells might remind Jim Jarmusch fans of the main threesome from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), except Godard’s characters are more aggressively persistent. One of Godard’s most accessible films, Band of Outsiders will be playing a one-week engagement at Film Forum September 7-13, with no screenings on September 11.