The " outsiders " of Jean-Luc Godard’s unnerving Bande à part aren’t just the trio of sort-of students who bungle a burglary — they’re the small band who love his film. Even in the rarefied context of Godard’s œuvre, this low-budget ($120,000) 1964 effort stands outside the " mainstream " of " hits " like Breathless, Alphaville, Masculine-Feminine, and Weekend. Yet it’s a milestone in his ongoing dialectic between art and reality: whereas Hollywood films seek to imitate life, Bande à part wants to imitate cinema.

The plot is perfunctory even by Godard standards. Parisians Franz (Sami Frey) and Odile (Anna Karina, Godard’s wife at the time) meet at an English-language school ( " Loui’s Cours " ); later Franz introduces Odile to his friend Arthur (Claude Brasseur). Franz and Arthur are out of work (the economy is bad); Odile lives with her guardian " aunt " in a villa in the suburbs where there’s a lodger with stacks of 10,000-franc notes. Franz and Arthur persuade Odile to help them steal this money. After some dithering, they go for it, but they need two tries to get just some of the loot, and of course (this is a Godard film) there’s a shoot-out.

Life, we observe, does not imitate art. Franz declares, " Someday I’ll buy a 24-cylinder Ferrari and race it at Indianapolis — then you’ll see " ; but his driving skills are limited to making tight circles with Arthur’s black sedan, and anyway, Ferraris don’t run at Indy. Arthur mimes Pat Garrett’s shooting of Billy the Kid in Tombstone — and he’s Billy, the legend rather than the hero, dying cinematically. They justify the robbery by fantasizing that the lodger probably accumulated his fortune by cheating on his taxes (maybe true, but still a fantasy); they wait till nightfall to hit the villa out of respect for " the tradition of bad B-movies. "

But no B-movie could be as bad as the one they make. Their first attempt fails when they find the lodger’s bedroom door and window both locked and can’t bring themselves to break in (too " real " ); on the following night, they have to bind and gag Odile’s guardian, and then the money’s been moved. Arthur goes back ostensibly to check on the guardian (keep your eye on the doghouse and the actual reason will become clear) and runs into his legionnaire cousin, who wants in on the deal.

Real-life romance is just as messy. At " Loui’s Cours, " the instructor reads passages from Romeo and Juliet in French expecting her far-from-advanced students to translate them back into English; she reads too fast and out of sequence, back to front. It’s all screwed up, as if Juliet had fallen for Tybalt instead of Romeo — and in fact Odile is drawn to thuggish, cynical Arthur rather than boyish, sensitive Franz: she declines Franz’s cigarette then accepts Arthur’s, and when they toss to see who will go out with her (how romantic is that?) and Franz wins, she goes with Arthur anyway. They play musical chairs around a café banquette where Franz and Arthur both try to sit on the bench with Odile while the other is left with the chair; eventually Franz and Arthur wind up on the bench. The only time the three are in synch is in the famous (Quentin Tarantino paid tribute to it in Pulp Fiction — remember Uma Thurman in that black Anna Karina wig?) sequence where they do the " Madison, " a nifty line dance that could indeed be a number in a Bob Fosse movie.

But in life, as Godard’s voiceover reminds us, " people never form a whole — they go their own way. " In other words, we’re all outsiders. When Odile runs from her guardian’s house to meet the boys, we see Karina moving with a childlike but fluid grace that only a camera could capture. Their heads full of movie moves, Franz and Arthur will never comprehend her. Did Godard, his own head full of movie moves, " write " this film as, like Contempt and Alphaville, a love letter to Karina? They divorced the following year.

Bande à part has been out of circulation for some time (the usual squabbling over rights); now it’s been re-released by Rialto and is getting a well-deserved week at the Brattle. (One caveat: the tape I watched suffered from that foreign-film bugaboo, frequently illegible subtitles.) Too bad it didn’t come out earlier, because it’s the ideal summer movie: you can learn more from watching it a dozen times than you would from seeing a dozen Hollywood films.

Issue Date: September 6 - 13, 2001