Bande à part [Band of Outsiders] (1964)

(Youtube Streaming, August 2020) When I think French Nouvelle Vague, I picture a vague mix of black-and-white cinematography, characters in a romantic triangle, the streets of Paris, references to Hollywood, and seemingly improvised philosophical discussions sometimes interrupted by the elements of a criminal subplot. In other words, I’m just about ready to designate Bande à part as the most new-wavish of the French New Wave movies. In writer-director Jean-Luc Godard’s hands, it features one woman and two men plotting a robbery in-between dancing at Parisian cafés, running through the Louvre and discussing Hollywood. It may feature budding criminals, but Bande à part qualifies as a genre-heavy crime film only by the loosest of definitions—it’s far more interested in the relationships and rambling discussions between the trio than the crime they’re planning to commit. As befit such an archetypical film, it has spawned numerous imitators from Tarantino (who practically worships the film and features a striking homage to its dance sequence in Pulp Fiction) to Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. For a cinephile, it’s interesting to see an influential film after its imitators and feel the mental click of puzzle pieces fitting together—it does help that Bande à part fully plays into nearly all of the clichés of its specific era of filmmaking: it’s an archetypical film, and perhaps best of all it’s curiously enjoyable as such—but then again most of Godard’s early movies are a charm to listen to once the characters get talking about such any subject. In the end, I’m not that overly enthusiastic about Bande à part… but I can see what the fuss is about.