Band of Outsiders

Would-be tough guys Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) have little better to do than drive around Paris and act out scenes from B movies. But when they team up with Franz’s English-class crush, wide-eyed Odile (Anna Karina), to plot a burglary, they stumble into the gap between playacting and reality. Godard said, “it is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them.” The atmosphere arises not only from the actors’ interplay—their dance in a cafe and their sprint through the Louvre are among the most memorable and joyous moments in Godard’s cinema—but from Raoul Coutard’s exquisitely bleak cinematography and Michel Legrand’s jaunty, melancholy score. Pauline Kael called the film “like a reverie of a gangster movie. . . . It’s as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines.”