Lately I've been reading Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" (quick mini-review: "It's fascinating, though too long and poorly-structured"). Ostensibly, it's a behind-the-scenes look at the revolutionary films and filmmakers working within and without the Hollywood system in the sixties and seventies. But underneath that glossy exterior lies a hidden subtext: Jean-Luc Godard influenced just about every "auteur" director since that term became fashionable.

From "Bonnie and Clyde", to "McCabe and Mrs. Miller", to "Taxi Driver" (whose style was "all Godard"), the Godfather of French New Wave is all over the works of these seminal American directors. William Friedkin, who began with arty pretensions but wound up making "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist" for popcorn audiences, summed up the dominant aesthetic of the time: "The New Wave of European filmmakers took over and we all went out and copied Godard and Fellini," he notes, before delivering the kicker, "forgetting where our roots were."

More recently, Quentin Tarantino anglicized the name of Godard's "Bande À Part" for his production company, "A Band Apart". Having seen -- and adored -- but one Godard film (his 1960 masterpiece, "À bout de souffle"), I figured it couldn't hurt to give in to what the fates were telling me, and check out the rest of his oeuvre.

On the surface "Bande À Part" ("Band of Outsiders") is the story of three Parisian misfits who plan a robbery. An innocent young girl is coerced by a couple of low-level hoods into stealing the fortune hidden in her aunt's villa. But, in reality, it's more about the loosey-goosey love triangle that envelops Odile (Anna Karina, Mrs. Jean-Luc Godard from 1961-68, and actor in 8 of her husband's films during that period), Arthur (Claude Brasseur), and Franz (Sami Frey, whose resemblance to Franz Kafka inspired his character's name).

When I say "in reality", what I really mean is "whoa, we're not done digging deeper and deeper into the hole of Godardian intention". For "Bande À Part" is really about deconstructing the cinematic form, deconstructing American pop culture, and deconstructing deconstruction itself. I'll leave that last bit alone, for now, because delving into those waters would require fourth dimensional consciousness. And I really don't feel up to that, right now. So let's look at the first two points, and be done with it.

Beginning with the title sequence, and the opening credits, we get a good idea that Godard is up to playing around with the conventions of film. The former appears over a series of hyper-quick cuts, jumping back and forth between Odile and Arthur, and scored by some spicy jazz. I'd call it "MTV-style editing", if it weren't for the fact that "MTV-style editing" only started strobing its way onto our TV sets more than a decade-and-a-half later. The credit sequence, by contrast, is slow and languid. But no less mischievous. The job being done is written in the centre, while the names of those doing the job are written above and below. The director's credit looks thusly:

JEAN LUC
CINÉMA
GODARD

…like his job was more of a nickname, or an ingrained part of his inherent identity. Cinema is life, and life is cinema, and Godard is the sun around which all the planets revolve. Or something equally as pretentious, but no less true.

The rest of the film is loaded with tongue-in-cheek stylized moments, the for which Godard is known. For example, a tense moment in a coffee shop finds Franz suggesting a minute of silence. Which he gets from his co-conspirators; only Godard also joins in, muting the background noise and the soundtrack score along with the dialogue. Franz gets fed up with this, and speaks even before a minute is up. There are also several startling moments when Odile, and later Franz, looks into and even addresses the camera. Breaking the fourth wall, so often a tired anti-convention in this day and age, somehow becomes lively and exotic in Godard's hands.

My favourite bit of nonsense, though, is the way Godard uses his narrator. As far as I'm concerned, the most winsome narrator in cinematic history is Sam Elliott in "The Big Lebowski". His opening ramble, sketching the finer points of the film's main character, finds him getting a bit off track. "Well, I lost my train of thought here," he says, amusing even himself. "But, aw hell, I done introduced him enough." There's something terribly appealing about a narrator who forgets what he was about to say. The omniscient voice that intrudes on the action here is born from the same mold.

At one point, he self-consciously rejects his assigned role, by "letting the images speak for themselves, rather than explaining" just what is going on. It's a strange thing for a narrator to say, assuming that his only real job is to explain just what is going on. Later, he forgets to be aloof, and just can't help but tell us what each of our "heroes" is thinking (while dancing "Odile wonders if the boys notice her breasts moving under her sweater"). And there's even a curious little bit, about a third of the way through, when he offers "a few words at random" for latecomers, to get them caught up with the plot. Assuming, of course, that there is a tangible plot in the first place. Whether the narrator is a nod to post-modern self-awareness, or just a big con job, I found him a boon to the iconoclasm that Godard appears to be preaching.

The film's deconstruction of American pop culture is a bit subtler, a bit less in-your-face. Having one early scene set in an English class, showing our heroes mangling Shakespeare, is a good start. Showing Arthur and Franz re-enacting the death of Billy the Kid -- a demise so comic and over-the-top that Godard couldn't help but return to it for a real death scene, later -- shows just where their criminal intentions came from. And discussions of bad B-movies, Coca-Cola, and the Indy 500 only cement the notion that these kids see themselves as American outlaws, American consumers, and Americans. Full stop. Though in some respects I don't see it as a desire to be Americans; more likely it's a desire to be better than the Americans, at the things Americans hold dear. "Franz had read about an American who'd done the Louvre in nine minutes and forty-five seconds," goes the setup to one site gag. "They'd do better." And indeed they do, sprinting through the famed museum as if they were set at 78 rpm.

There's an uneasy relationship between the cinematic walls Godard wants to knock down, and his belief that they can be knocked down. "Everything that is new is thereby automatically traditional," says Odile at one point. She's quoting T.S. Eliot, and effectively summing up the ineffectualness of any artist who strives towards originality. The filmmakers of the seventies, who litter the pages of Biskind's book, effectively prove this. Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, et al., began with big dreams: to save the cinematic world, taking their cue from innovators like Godard. But the rebels eventually became the establishment, the new winding up aggressively traditional. The irony (tragedy?) is that "Bande À Part" still looks fresh, and vital, and downright original, even as it begins its fourth decade of life. It just goes to show that there are still new places for cinema to go, while remaining interesting, and entertaining, and downright pleasing. More Godard, please.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD