Amazon.com reviews for
Bande à part (1964)

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Band of Outsiders (vhs):

Amazon.com Essentials: Described by its maker, Jean-Luc Godard, as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka," this 1964 film noir stars Anna Karina as a naive woman who takes up with couple of would-be bad guys (Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey) in a disastrous effort to rob her aunt of a fortune. Along the way, the motley group joins the Godardian (and Hollywood gangster) tradition of characters who walk a line between reality and invention, in this case distracting themselves by running around the Louvre, taking a stab at learning English, stumbling through some dance steps, and reenacting the death of Billy the Kid. A uniquely spontaneous work in Godard's canon, Band of Outsiders also continues the Brechtian strain in the director's merged relationship with Karina, his then-wife and artistic muse. Yet it is also more buoyantly unpredictable in its sense of romantic doom than any of the director's movies since his seminal debut, Breathless (also a gangster film, not coincidentally). --Tom Keogh