Band of Outsiders (1964)

Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 lark follows three Parisian youths who mimic Hollywood noirs, dance in a crowded cafe, and plan a robbery they are not equipped to perform. It arrives at our desk carrying almost none of the cultural freight we are trained to weigh. The cast is uniformly white and European. The concerns are boredom, cinema, and a suitcase of money. Nobody pauses to instruct the audience on how to feel about any of it. Anna Karina's Odile drifts through the triangle as an object of desire, and the film shows no interest in correcting that position. This is not a moral achievement. It is a film made in 1964, and our instruments register accordingly.

The narration is the only element that registers at all, and faintly. Godard's surrogate voice cuts in to announce the running time of a sprint through the Louvre, to note the exact duration of a silence, to treat the machinery of storytelling as a toy. A less disciplined picture would use that same voice to lecture us about youth, money, or the cruelty of men. Here the commentary is a formal prank, delivered with a shrug, and it fades as quickly as it arrives. The heist itself is motivated by nothing grander than restlessness, so there is no economic grievance to extract, no indictment of wealth, no cause beyond the romantic idea of being an outlaw.

What remains is a reverie of a gangster picture, charming and quietly sad, in which three young people with nothing to do drift toward a blaze of glory that may be exactly what they want. The dance endures. The Louvre sprint endures. The rest is a film content to be a film, untouched by the anxieties that now accompany every release. Our classification is swift and unremarkable: the markers sit at zero across the board, disturbed only by that faint narrational hum. A relic, then. A pleasant one.