For years, Jean-Luc Godard's films have truly been films "found on a scrap heap," one littered with wretched, unwatchable dubs. Among those wretched films of the earth was Godard's 1964 meditation (and mediation) on B-movie crime dramas, Band of Outsiders (aka Bande a part). But in the last several years, many of Godard's great films have been remastered and handled with care, and Band of Outsiders is one of the rescued.

Based on Dolores Hitchen's Crime Club novel, Fools' Gold, the film concerns two Parisian lowlifes (Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey) who take up with a long-in-the-tooth French schoolgirl (the exquisite Anna Karina) to rob a cache of loot hidden in her aunt's house.

As is usually the case with Godard, the story itself is ultimately superfluous -- the tale's sardonic narrator, Godard himself, brushes away the plot with a curt, "A few words chosen at random. A pile of money. An English class. A house by the river. A romantic girl." Less concerned with narrative originality that with new ways to tell a two-bit tale, Godard turns his characters into walking (although unaware) repositories of an unending stream of literary and pop culture allusions (a collection of insouciant character traits eagerly lapped up years later by Quentin Tarantino, whose production company bears the telling moniker of A Band Apart).

Less bitter and more melancholy about cultural loss than he would be a scant three years later with his incendiary Weekend (which also utilizes the plot setup of robbing some relatives), Band of Outsiders is perhaps the last Godard film of a non-partisan digitalis exegesis.

It is also joyful spur-of-the-moment cinema, heralded at the start by Godard's beloved cacophonic sounds of Paris traffic. The unfettered immediacy of such seemingly instantaneous occurrences as Brasseur and Frey trading off reading tabloid news items aloud, a wild dash through the Louvre, and a lengthy "moment of silence" when the soundtrack cuts out completely is pure, impish Godard. (Frey remarks that "a moment of silence can last a long time... an eternity.")

It is certainly Godard's loopiest film. The credits alone are screwy. Godard credits himself as Jean-Luc Cinema Godard and Michel Legrand's credit reads "For the last time on the screen, music by Michel Legrand." The characters also pass under a swanky neon sign on the Place Clichy that reads "Nouvelle Vague." Godard's narrator also infuses the film with an off-the-cuff, who-cares quality, interjecting into the action remarks like "Odile said she's blurted it out but meant it." But it doesn't end there. In a language class, a student asks, "How do you say 'a big million dollar film'?" At certain moments, even the characters can't take what is going on too seriously. When the caper plot is explained to Karina, she asks "Un plan?" and then turn directly to the camera and asks "Pourquoi?"

But the most joyous and telling set piece of all is the impromptu jukebox dance in a café when Breasseur, Karina, and Frey dance the Madison. Dancing beside one another but all alone, Godard reveals his characters stuck in their own separate spheres, cut from both each other and themselves. A bande a part.

Aka Bande à part.



Let's twist again.