Opiniões dos críticos

It's as far as one can get from most gangster films—French as well as American. There's no tragic anti-hero in the central role—just a young girl who might ordinarily be called a damsel in distress... She triggers the film's real action. And that action is the "Madison." For Band of Outsiders is a gangster film with a mini-musical inside of it. Anna Karina is the star of that musical. As she and her cohort trip the light fantastic, they take us somewhere we've never really been before.

There's much more to the film than that impetuously romantic surface that fans like Quentin Tarantino and Hal Hartley immediately remember. That is not to say it doesn't deserve its reputation as one of Godard's warmest and most widely appealing movies... Band of Outsiders hews closer to the template of his groundbreaking 1960 debut Breathless in marrying a comprehensible plot with riffs on popular genres and fairly fleshed-out characters, all marinated in his distinctly cool modernist style.

Thinly plotted, indifferently paced, often distracted, filmed against white walls or through drizzle on drab sidewalks, Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 film Band Of Outsiders is a movie held together by attitude; its title has long since become a byword for all things timelessly and effortlessly hip and offbeat... [It's] come to be regarded as one of Godard's most accessible films. But behind its substantial charm and light touch is a movie that's more morbid, alienated, and personal than it lets on.

If "Band of Outsiders" is frequently heartbreaking, it's never depressing. The genius of Godard's filmmaking is that we can see both the futility and the necessity of his movie love, as expressed by his characters' reckless schemes as well as every movement of his camera.

It's no surprise that, as shot by the great Raoul Coutard, the movie is beautiful. But it's the bleakest sort of beauty: winter-bare trees, the perishing and deserted streets of the Parisian exurbs, shabby cafés and lodgings... This is a world apart from the way so many contemporary movies riff on and ironically fetishize our cinematic past. Godard works at an affectionate distance that allows him to comment on his characters' naïveté — but still close enough that he can hear their hearts break.

Though a consummate filmmaker, Godard is at his best when also courting the duties of historian and philosopher. That's partly why Band of Outsiders, though one of his more purely entertaining early films, ranks among Godard's slightest, matched perhaps only by A Woman Is a Woman in terms of conceptual and intellectual paucity.

There's something of both [musical comedy and grand tragedy] in the joy and alienation expressed equally in Arthur, Franz, and Odile's dance, choreographed to bar jukebox and internal monologue. Never have three people been so alone together, a band and apart, in a singular double exposure of one moment arriving as another passes away.

It's a gangster film/musical pastiche, a home-movie version of what Godard had seen of George Cukor and Nicholas Ray's film. It doesn't quite work—pastiches rarely do, but Godard's missteps (the anemic heist plot, Anna Karina's endless run through the wilderness, a slight overuse of a few Legrand tracks) are more than repaid by the film's substantial pleasures.

For me there's no set piece in Band of Outsiders that can equal the dazzling effect that is Anna Karina's face. At this point she was far from her early days as a model, getting several years' worth of quick and cruel lessons in life and art from Godard; in Band of Outsiders Karina combines her natural wide-eyed angelic charm with an increasingly frustrated, worldly pragmatism, and it's a winning, poignant combination.

It's one of Godard's least substantial and adventuresome films, as well as his most conventional one. It was recognized as such at the time by the critics most familiar with his work, and by Godard himself; and yet—or perhaps, as a result—it was eventually exalted as one of his great artistic triumphs by critics who were bewildered by his more audacious and original films. Its ongoing popularity is due precisely to the film's overt neoclassicism.

Band of Outsiders has its sociological elements, but you have to dig for them, and its anti-Americanism is mixed with too much affection for American culture to be taken straight. What seems most striking today, in spite of the many moments of comedy and elation, is how painfully candid and personal it is in its despair and disillusionment.

A knowing confusion and euphoria occurs while watching these men, and when Odile jumps in on their fun, we too feel punctuations of elation. In the film's most thrilling sequence, the three dance a snapping swivel dance in a cafe that, in its simplicity, is pure caprice. We feel alive. And no matter what else happens in the film, that rapturous memory remains.