Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Year: 1964
Country: France
Language: French
Subtitles: English
Length: 92 mins
Format: PAL | R2
Colour: Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.33: 1
Certificate: PG
Alternate Title: Band Of Outsiders

Synopsis

Gleefully putting into practice D. W. Griffith's maxim that all you need to make a film is a girl and a gun, Bande A Part (Band Of Outsiders) is Godard's playful tribute to the Hollywood pulp crime movies of the Forties, executed with typically Gallic cool.

Franz and Arthur, a couple of streetwise chancers, team up with the shy Odile (a beguiling performance from Anna Karina, Godard's wife and muse at the time) to plan a robbery. As the trio of misfits roam the cafs of suburban Paris, do a lightning tour of the Louvre, and play-act shoot-outs, the suspicion grows that this is one heist that is not going to go according to plan.

As well as superb photography by Raoul Coutard and music by Michel Legrand, Bande A Part features one of the most exhilarating dance sequences in film, which so impressed Quentin Tarantino that he paid homage to it with John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, and named his production company, Band A Part, after the film. Hal Hartley also paid homage to the sequence in Simple Men (1992).

Shot in just 25 days, Bande A Part was greeted with puzzlement and even distaste when first released. Over the years it has become one of Godard admirers' favourite films and is one that no French cinema DVD collection should be without.

Special Features

- Comprehensive interactive A-Z guide including a specially commissioned video interview with Anna Karina, Quentin Tarantino on the dance sequence, clips, stills, on-set footage and commentary by Dr Roland-Francois Lack, lecturer in the Department of French at University College London.
- An interview with cinematographer Raoul Coutard.
- The original theatrical trailer.
- A biography of director Jean-Luc Godard.