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Bande à part
 cast: Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur

director: Jean-Luc Godard

92 minutes (PG) 1964
BFI DVD Region 2 retail

RATING: 6/10
 reviewed by Mike Philbin
A young virgin girl attends English language school with a couple of nut jobs. Together they plan to rob Madame Victoria's house of all the money stashed away in the room of Monsieur Stolz, but nothing goes as planned. If this is a classic Godard film, I don't know what all the fuss was about.
   Sure, all the background sound is intrusively foreground. Sure, that's not the way to behave in class. Sure, there's a very nice dance routine in reel two. Sure, it brought a new meaning to men in tights. Sure, the shootout is pure high camp. Sure, it must have been innovative in those days to show a virgin in a kilt. A teen angst film in all its immature flavours and depictions of emotion, surely.
   Based on the Dolores Hitchin novel Fool's Gold, Bande à part (aka: The Outsiders) treats the ordinary with a sweating greyness of the trip-like aura Godard is renowned for, without resorting to flashy techniques to portray the mundane. And, curiously, it left me with this gut reaction paranoia of horny emptiness.
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