Nouvelles Femmes: Band of Outsiders
October 21, 2026
Godard puts his appreciative-playful spin on Hollywood-style Noir. Two guys (Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey) team with a lovely, naive, doe-eyed language student (Anna Karina) to steal money that’s hidden in her rooming house. Karina conveys a woman coming into her exuberant selfhood. When the three line dance the Madison, she keeps going, bouncing and smiling.
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Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Jean-Luc Godard returns from Contempt’s sun-splashed Mediterranean to Parisian black-and-white and the passion of his heart, his actress wife Anna Karina, the foremost icon of New Wave women. As in Breathless, Godard puts his appreciative-playful spin on Hollywood-style Noir. Two guys (Arthur: Claude Brasseur, Franz: Sami Frey), who perform pretend shoot-outs in the street, meet lovely, naive, doe-eyed Odile (Karina) at their English language class, where they break rules and pass notes to each other. There’s a stack of money hidden in the house where Odile lives, so why don’t they figure out how to steal it? Odile is less worldly than the men, but Karina conveys a woman growing into her exuberant selfhood. In a delightful sequence the three line dance the Madison for minutes of screen time. The men eventually tire and drop out, but smiling Odile keeps going, bouncing and snapping her fingers. Can these three pull off their robbery? They endearingly don’t seem up to it. There will be loaded guns, a dog’s breath cloud, the tallest ladder—and maybe a Hollywood ending. Godard and his master cinematographer Raoul Coutard make winter light and working class suburbs as richly flavorful as "Emily in Paris’s" picture postcard glamour. Going into Band of Outsiders, Anna Karina was at a personal low point; she says, “That film saved my life.” Quentin Tarantino loves this movie so much that he named his production company A Band Apart.
- Director: Jean-Luc Godard
- Principal Cast: Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur
- Country: France
- Year: 1964
- Running Time: 95 min.
- Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, Dolores Hitchens
- Cinematographers: Raoul Coutard
- Editors: Françoise Collin, Dahlia Ezove, Agnès Guillermot
- Music: Michel Legrand
- Language: French
- Has Subtitles: Yes
- US Distributor: Rialto Pictures