 “All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun,” Jean-Luc Godard declared in one of his famously gnomic one-liners. Following the relatively lavish production that was Le mépris, the director returned to low-budget, no-frills filmmaking with this freewheeling adaptation of Dolores Hitchens’ 1950s American crime novel Fools’ Gold. Dispensing with the novel’s predictable character psychology and plot twists, Godard leaves only a minimal story involving two petty thieves and a girl who ineptly try to burgle a house, with disastrous consequences. The girl is of course played by Anna Karina, Godard’s muse at the time, whose image here is very different to the glamorous one presented in the earlier films. In Bande à part the glamour is quite deliberately played down, which is in keeping with the film’s working-class milieu. Despite the depressed settings, the movie is a great deal of fun and contains some of Godard’s most memorable set-pieces, including a run through the Louvre at high speed and a much-quoted sequence in which the three leads dance the Madison in a half-empty café.
FRANCE • 1964 • SUBTITLED • BLACK AND WHITE • 35MM • 95 MIN
Director: JEAN-LUC GODARD
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