Jean Luc Godard's seventh feature film finds him back in familiar bohemian Paris with bright young folk quoting Rimbaud, hanging out in cafes, staring through the fourth wall and even stopping the action to make points. Along the way, the robbery which would have been at the centre of an audience's attention, is blithely left in the background as the trio negotiates its life, affinities and so on. Sounds twee and precious? It isn't. Some of the dialogue strays into philosophy but there is a greater appeal to popular culture and the three effectively imagine themselves in the movie that we are watching.
While Godard did have serious points to make, having emerged from three much harder films about terrorism, war and fame's exploitation, this outing with its sprint through the Louvre, testing people's tolerance of silence on screen (the duration of which is just over half the claimed minute but feels interminable) and a parade of other conceits that might have ended up cute in the hands of another filmmaker. Godard is yet again showing his audience how fiction is fabricated, how actors are quoting and how the action centrepiece of a noir plot is both farcical and serious.
Anna Karina as the yet again self-illuminating centre provides us with a young woman willing to approach her life as a jam session. She leads an impromptu dance with the boys in a cafe which looks improvised but was choreographed that way. She brings the action to a halt by demonstrating the minute of silence. She struggles with the attentions of Arthur but admits her attraction early. Next to her complexity, the philosophy spouting romantic Franz seems like an overdressed lightweight and the puggish Arthur a directionless drifter. That means that when the robbery comes up, the mishaps are sometimes comic and sometimes grave, all in one extended scene (there are actually two attempts at the robbery but let's relax that for the point). When bumbling action is intruded upon by fatality, the transition suddenly feels natural. After all that whimsy and lightness, Godard has brought it together to give us a high stakes climax.
The film auteur's most popularly celebrated film is his debut feature A bout de souffle (Breathless) which is a playful noir. I much prefer this in the same vein for its confidence and the more assured use of that kind of play. I enjoy Breathless but I'm compelled by Bande a part. Godard had covered musicals in extraordinary fashion with Une femme est une femme, tough politics in Les carbiniers and Le petite soldat and self reflexive cinema production in Le mepris. His return to noir showed him stronger this time around the loop. This would continue until his political commitments drove the narrative out in preference for harder essays from 1966 on to the extent where he collectivised his film production and presented the results of his demolition of conventional cinema (at least for his own work, of course).
That made him a personal hero to me in my undergraduate years when I even started smoking lung ravaging French cigarettes and claiming a preference for the later, less watchable films (while always preferring the easier ones). It also exposed me to a world of ridiculing normies who thought they were being witty when launching attacks on any kind of cinema reset and how feeble the counter argument was and is. Godard's efforts in tearing convention to shreds influenced everything those folks celebrate about the New Hollywood of the '70s or Tarantino's self-avowedly derivative work (his production company name Band Apart is lifted from this movie). If you are familiar with Godard's early career but find it variously too cute or arcane, track this down. Of all the milestones and audacious taunts at convention, Bande a part remains the solid sweet spot. If you can't come out of this something like a sigh of pleasure don't investigate Godard any further, it won't be for you. If you are pleased by it, you have a world of endeavour before you, a lot of it tauntingly difficult but most of it worth every second. Start here.
