Bande à part (1964)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Film Review

Until quite recently, Bande à part has been widely considered one of Jean-Luc Godard's minor films, little more than a whimsical homage to the cheap American crime novels that were so beloved by Godard and his French New Wave contemporaries. It is so easy to dismiss the film as merely an intermediate step between Godard's dazzling first feature À bout de souffle (1960) and his multi-layered masterpiece Pierrot le fou (1965).  It is true that these films deserve to be grouped together and show a natural progression in their deconstruction of the American pulp fiction thriller.  Yet, far from being a halfway house, Bande à part is a work of art in its own right, an insightful piece of social commentary that is as profound and unsettling as anything put forward by Godard.

In common with JLG's other thrillers, Bande à part derives from a trashy American crime novel, this time Dolores Hitchens' Fools' Gold.  By transposing the action of the novel from Los Angeles to Paris and jettisoning the trite psychological rationalisation of the main characters' behaviour, Godard sketches a portrait of disaffected French youth that is both depressing and astonishingly true-to-life.  The film could almost be regarded as a documentary, so authentically does it evoke the social, political and cultural estrangement of a generation that had lost its purpose and identity, just as France itself was struggling to find its own identity.  Godard puts it succinctly in one of the many flowery voiceovers that punctuate the sparse narrative:  "Franz thinks of everything and nothing, uncertain if reality is becoming dream, or dream reality."

The three main characters - Odile, Franz and Arthur - are intended to represent this génération maudite, three distinct individuals whose reality is almost exclusively shaped by popular culture, specifically cinema and cheap crime fiction.  So effective is this cultural brainwashing (which is mostly of an American hue) that the three protagonists appear to be completely blind to their own cultural heritage and no longer have the ability to think for themselves.  Their slavish devotion to low art is laughably evident in their decision to postpone the planned robbery until after dark, out of respect for the conventions of the série noire novel.  They fill in the dead hours beforehand by performing an act of cultural sacrilege, racing through the corridors of the Louvre Palace in an attempt to beat a pointless record.   Presumably the reason they all attend an English class is to try to fill a cultural void.  Unfortunately, their teacher is as disconnected from reality as they are; she insists that it is far more important to know how to spell 'Thomas Hardy' than to be able to ask directions to the nearest hotel.

The three friends live in a dream world that has been fashioned for them by popular culture.  They look as if they are a gang, with a common purpose (i.e. robbery), but as the film develops it becomes apparent that they are as separate from each other as they are from the society around them. This is made apparent in the film's most famous sequence, in which they perform a dance together in a café.  At first, the three youngsters seem to be dancing in unison, but their individual personalities soon begin to emerge through their different steps and gestures, and the illusion that they are really a gang is quickly dispelled.  Ultimately, the only thing that connects Odile, Franz and Arthur is their tragic susceptibility to popular culture.  Almost everything they do and say is a reference to lowbrow crime fiction, and when reality does finally catch up with them they are forced to assume the identity of pulp fiction stereotypes: a corpse and a couple on the run.

The success of cinema, both as a medium of artistic expression and a form of mass entertainment, has made it so powerful, so pervasive, that it not only influences our behaviour, but also shapes how we view ourselves and the world around us.  Cinema (along with its bastard offspring, television) has become a prism through which we are conditioned, from our earliest moments of consciousness, to perceive reality.  Its clichés and idioms have become a universal, readily adopted language that avoids the necessity for critical thought and serious self-examination.  In Bande à part, Godard makes this point succinctly by comparing a 'fake' killing with a 'real' one.  The scene in which Arthur simulates the death of Billy the Kid appears realistic because it adheres to the conventions of cinema.  By contrast, the later scene in which Arthur is shot dead by his uncle appears ludicrously protracted and artificial, because it departs from the familiar conventions.  A century after it was created by two French brothers who felt it had no future, cinema has now become the equivalent of the Ancient Greek Oracle, telling us what is real and how things should be, draining our critical faculties and our precious individuality as it does so.

Picking up where Le Mépris (1963) left off, Bande à part exposes the shallowness of popular culture in general and commercial cinema in particular.  From this point on, Godard's cinema would become increasingly a rejection of cinematic convention and an attempt to develop alternative, deeper forms of expression through the art of cinema.  By the time he had completed Made in U.S.A. (1966), Godard had effectively ripped the guts out of American pulp fiction, exposing it for the vacuous pile of reconstituted trash it is.  Thereafter, he was able to devote himself to his political concerns, although his preoccupation with the effects of popular culture on society and individuals would continue to underpin much of his work.

Made at that felicitous time in his career when Godard still had the ability to reach out to a mainstream cinema audience whilst giving the intellectuals something to mull over, Bande à part manages to be both profound and accessible.  The main characters are convincingly drawn (Anna Karina's Odile being one of the most well-developed and sympathetic heroines in Godard's entire oeuvre) and what the film lacks in the way of a coherent plot is made up for by its unflagging sense of fun, which is sustained by some irresistible jolts of typically Godardian humour (at times, the film feels like a cheeky parody of Truffaut's Jules et Jim).  The film's accessibility could explain why it has long been considered one of Godard's lesser works, a victim of that cultural snobbery which dictates that anything popular must be bereft of true artistic merit.  Bande à part is a film that proves the contrary - an engaging crowdpleaser which oozes with Nouvelle Vague charm and which, if you care to look beyond the surface whimsy, contains a message of truly mind-blowing proportions.  Where once our lives were rounded with a sleep, now they are in danger of becoming no more than a sad accumulation of cultural clichés.  Hélas pour nous...

Film Synopsis

Odile is a young woman who lives in Paris, working as a housekeeper for her aunt, Madame Victoria.  She tells Franz, a fellow student at the language school she attends, that her neighbour, Mr Stoltz, keeps a huge stash of money in an unlocked cupboard.  Franz passes this information onto his friend Arthur, who persuades the other two to steal the money.  As all three are devotees of popular crime fiction, nothing could be simpler, but their criminal escapade soon turns into a farce.  Having accidentally asphyxiated Madame Victoria, the would-be crooks find that the money has disappeared.  Then Arthur's criminal relatives turn up, and the farce becomes a tragedy...