Godard explains his "Bande à part mood": "...characters who live off the cuff and whose speech is recorded directly. It is constructed on the actors. The interesting thing is this sort of fluidity, being able to feel existence like physical matter: it is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them. Even when they are in close-up, life exists around them..." (quoted in Tom Milne's Godard on Godard). Godard's outsiders are three would-be burglars (Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur, who attempt to rob Karina's aunt's suburban house and, of course, botch the job) dancing on the edge of crime, on the outskirts of Paris, on the fringe of society. The film pays playful homage to the more freewheeling characters of Hollywood in the thirties, but the homage only underlines the impossibility. Karina's song in the Metro is a moment of acute awareness, not escape; and the fact that the trio can't dance makes their attempt at the Manhattan in a suburban cafe a kind of epiphany of its own. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard turns the Parisian suburbs into an insular, almost storybook world for the tipsy troika; but they are so much more real than Fred and Ginger, Judy and Gene that their separateness is actually painful. "These characters are truly a 'band of outsiders,'" Godard has said. "They are more honest with themselves than with others. They are not among those who want to be cut off from the world, it is the world that is far from them" (quoted in Sadoul, Dictionary of Films).