The Frame

Oh, Jean-Luc Godard. You and I have had a rather uneasy cinematic relationship, I know. I’ve considered your colleague François Truffaut to be the essential New Wave director and his masterpiece The 400 Blows to be greater than yours, Breathless. So why, after seeing Breathless multiple times, as well as your other most famous film Contempt, is it this admittedly important but slightly lesser film Band of Outsiders that made me fall voraciously in love with your films? Why should this slight story of three young people and their rather apathetic and doomed robbery attempt have captivated me so much? Is it the joyful spontaneity with which the characters suddenly break into an imitation of an American crime film? Is it your noncommital camera that seems both objective and tragically sympathetic at the same time? Is it the almost wholly foreign (to Americans) tendency to showcase scenes–like the scene where the characters dance in a cafe for several minutes, or the one where they experiment with a minute of complete silence–that seem to do nothing to advance the plot, but rather embrace the lives of the characters? Is it your bittersweet, detached yet complicit voiceover narration? Maybe. I only know that after watching it, I immediately added all of your movies to my Netflix queue.
Superior