Two aspiring Parisian thugs, Franz and Arthur (Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur), are drawn to violence as bit players in a film noir: they adore the cool indifference, the macho invulnerability. All that is to change when Odile (Anna Karina) enlists them to burglarize the villa where she works, and reality arrives like a police siren. None of Godard's early films captures the “trembling” of youth and love as marvelously as Band of Outsiders, in which a very good girl (Odile even uses hand signals on her bike) goes just bad enough to dance the Madison in a cafe and turn the dreary Paris suburbs into something out of Les vampires. For Franz and Arthur (named after Kafka and Rimbaud), things are a little more perilous, and in telling their story, the film's voiceover narration turns a série noir novel into existential poetry.

Band of Outsiders is repeated on Saturday, September 6.