Better Call Vince

I don't know about you but I certainly missed Better Call Saul. I had quibbles about both series in the Breaking Bad universe but generally both shows produce reliably solid episodes. The season première from two nights ago of Better Call Saul had to pick up with a Saul who seemed ready to abandon his legal career altogether, an intimidating volley of plot lobbed from one season to the next. This première handled it pretty well, even if it did, in the end, completely reverse Saul's crucial decision from the end of the first season, but much of significance transpired before that.

Saul, or Jimmy as we're still calling him, has an ongoing problem where he lives to please or impress the people he loves. First he wants to please his high powered lawyer brother, then it's all about Kim, whom he asks point blank if his career decisions will have any effect on whether she'll finally be his lover.

That kind of sincerity is a little awkward--Saul seems like he'd be cagey enough to know that, if Kim's affections were based entirely on his career path, she probably wouldn't admit it. But it sets up the cool scene where Saul shows off his hustling skills with the stockbroker guy who very much deserves to be had. I love that it's seeing Jimmy working a con that really seems to light Kim's fire.

Also good was the subplot about Mike and the meek IT drug dealer and his ludicrous new ride.

Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Saul, used to write for The X-Files, the new episode of which did not shine so brightly as Better Call Saul. In fact, "Babylon", written and directed by creator Chris Carter, was incredibly bad.

There were so many missed opportunities. Seeing Mulder and Scully deal with Islamic terrorism could've been fascinating but the whole episode plays it like a joke while using it more as a pretext to introduce Mulder and Scully: The Next Generation, Miller and Einstein.

I feel bad for these actors, particularly the young woman playing Einstein, because no-one could've made these roles work. Not Marlon Brando and Sarah Bernhardt. Miller and Einstein seem like the set up for a joke and I was expecting them to be killed followed by a quip from Mulder, "That could've been us!" The idea that Carter would be so foolish as to make some newcomers directly compete with Mulder and Scully seemed absurd and yet he went ahead and did it. This bad decision mixes with the half baked terrorism plot to become a thin, tasteless soup. And that's not even mentioning the stupid Mulder on Magic Mushrooms scene where he line dances to Billy Ray Cyrus and there's a brief appearance by the Lone Gunman. This had better not be the only appearance of the Lone Gunman. But it would be part and parcel of an episode composed of astonishingly bad ideas.

When Internet Failed

Getting internet at my new apartment is an ongoing drama. I slept there the first time on Thursday night, on the floor, after moving things until 2am. I got up at 7:30am so I could meet the cable guy who told me my modem was no good because it was under a different name in Cox's database. So I bought a new modem and made another appointment for Monday. An older man and a young trainee came this time. After hooking everything up, I saw a message from Facebook pop up in the lower right hand corner. "Looks like it's online!" I said.

Reluctantly, the older man opened the web browser and my home page, a random Wikipedia entry, popped up. It wasn't even 10am yet, I was happy to have a little honeymoon with the internet before I had to be off to school. But the cable guy wasn't satisfied, saying something vague about how he had to go downstairs and check the splitter and then I'd "really be cookin'!" So my modem went offline.

Whatever he did, when the modem came back to life it started an endless series of reboots. While the older man was downstairs, I asked the trainee, "So what exactly was wrong with it before?"

He mumbled something about how if the modem didn't hit certain levels they weren't allowed to leave.

Finally, the connexion took hold, I thanked the men, they left, and I lost internet. Then it came back, then I lost it again a few minutes later. If I'm quick, I can check e-mail or post tweets. I find it best to plan ahead for my little windows of connexion and like a well oiled machine leap into activity. Mostly I'm caught flat footed. "It's on, it's on! Oh, gods, what do I do first? Think!"

Having an intermittent internet is kind of worse than having none at all. I kept compulsively checking it last night, trying to Google for solutions in my brief windows. I was downloading the new Better Call Saul which got to 96% before Internet failed entirely for the rest of the night. Now that was frustrating. It wasn't until this morning that I finally downloaded the remaining 4%. So last night all I watched was a third season episode of The Simpsons, "When Flanders Failed".

I love how Mr. Burns constantly has to be told who Homer is. "Simpson, eh?"

Again, I'm struck by how moral and gentle The Simpsons is compared to modern adult animated series. The episode opens with Homer trying to mow his entire lawn with a weed wacker which Flanders chides him for. It's very human and it develops the characters--Homer comes off as dumb and petty while Flanders is kind while kind of annoying for being so devoid of pettiness. And you like both of them. Family Guy and South Park would've given us some post-modern self-referential comedy or some cheap politics. I guess Bob's Burgers is probably much closer to classic Simpsons though I've only seen bits and pieces of Bob's Burgers.

The Wikipedia entry tells me "When Flanders Failed" is filled with "cultural references to playwright William Shakespeare and the film It's a Wonderful Life." I'd completely missed the Shakespeare references so I scrolled down to read, "Akira's school is located in the mall next to Shakespeare's Fried Chicken, a reference to the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare." Ah . . . that Shakespeare.

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Pretended bleeps won't censor stuff at all.
No mention made of mints mutated now.
A pillow's arm arrested growth this fall.
That winter goes for summer's cumbent cow.
The smashing watermelon played its seed.
Encumbering cucumber cummerbunds
Complete the tux the veggie men will need.
Orlando's dram misrhymes for Rosalinds.
Blank ostrich sheets can cover brains like men.
If hearts have failed and buckets fall like pails,
A star will pop like maize to make the grin.
Since you're not supposed to do like the whales.
Undrained, the peaty dome descends on space.
The shape of kinder beds appeals to grace.

As a Funeral

I suppose you couldn't ask Shakespeare for a play more serious than Macbeth. King Lear has a fool, Hamlet has plenty of jokes from the prince himself. Titus Andronicus has a macabre humour. And yet, director Justin Kurzel saw fit to edit out even the few tiny hints of levity from his 2015 film version of Macbeth. But he pares the story down even more than that for a finished product that's more narrowly focused and youthful. I imagine Kurzel would blush angrily if he found someone had sneaked "Double, double toil and trouble" back into a cut of his film. But it is beautifully shot when it's not relying on colour filters and features some very nice performances from Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and Sean Harris.

I like Michael Fassbender usually when he has a strong director to keep him in check but in the case of Macbeth a bit of wild grandstanding is perhaps just what the doctor ordered. It's certainly appropriate in the banquet scene where Lady Macbeth nervously tries to explain away her husband's suddenly erratic behaviour. And Fassbender's grin when he tells her his mind is full of scorpions is perfect.

Some contrast might have been nice, though. The porter is gone, of course, with his broad antics. I feel like his absence is related to Kurzel's tendency to set up group shots like still photographs. Here's David Thewlis ably playing Duncan, waiting with a group of motionless advisers and soldiers.

There's the sense that if you're not a lord or lady or their kid, all you do in this film is stand around waiting like a chess piece. None of the soldiers in the background chat with each other, everything is about the elite. It reminded me of how Game of Thrones has a tendency to completely omit the lower class. I wondered if the film's use of colour filters is part of the same general short attention span that demands the total focus on the power players.

Even the witches--as I said, they're deprived of their famous line. Usually they're portrayed as cackling or grinning. Here they seem to be mournfully reciting their remaining lines, having sort of a hushed grief about them. Also, they appear to be Bajorans.

Kurzel doesn't seem like he'd be a Trekkie. Maybe that's meant to be an Eastern Orthodox crucifix between their eyes though that also wouldn't make any sense. Unless it's meant to reflect some kind of general suspicion felt towards Eastern Europe, I'm not sure where Kurzel would be getting that from in the play's original text.

Before seeing the film, I read that the main change made to the story was that it began with the death of Macbeth's child. The film seems to focus more on the deaths of children with this child's death being followed by the death in battle of a boy who seems to be Macbeth's son. For all that, I thought Macduff's beautifully written, heartbroken "all my pretty chickens" dialogue could've been handled with less testosterone as the scene feels like it's become more focused on Macduff's desire for revenge than his grief.

It does in some sense feel like "Shakespeare for 300 fans" in that the battle scenes have that continual shift between slow and normal motion. Added to the lack of humanity established in the soldiers, there's a lack of reality to the battle scenes. This works in the sense that we're trapped inside the madness of Lord and Lady Macbeth but, again, contrast would have been nice. The slow motion and still photograph posing gives the film the impression of a dream.

Like Orson Welles' version, the characters all speak with Scottish accents, despite the fact that all accents would've been quite different in the time when the play was written. But it does add to the establishment of location for the film. The gorgeous shots of misty heath and moor certainly don't hurt.

Welles' version also felt like a nightmare version of the play though a more lucid one. Kurzel has a tendency to overlap the sound from scenes with shots from others giving the film an oddly droning, sedate quality. It's almost more mildly worrying dream than nightmare.

I'd quibble with a few individual choices. In this version, Malcolm discovers Macbeth basically in the act of murdering Duncan and Macbeth makes no attempt to hide what he's done. This has the effect of making Malcolm seem like a bit of a coward. It made more sense for him to flee to England when he didn't know who the murderer was, now he's just running away.

I really liked the costumes and, as I've said, a lot of the landscape shots are simply lovely. When Macbeth becomes king he gets a castle though the home where Duncan makes his fateful visit to him is oddly shown to be just a group of tents and a little wooden church.

The famous "To-morrow and to-morrow" soliloquy is spoken by Macbeth directly to the corpse of Lady Macbeth as he holds her in his arms which makes a bigger difference to the lines than I might have anticipated. The way I'm used to hearing the lines, I felt like they were Macbeth reflecting on the loneliness and meaninglessness of his existence, a truth which he felt even before Lady Macbeth died. Here, Fassbender crooning to her body makes the lines feel like they're his impression of how she felt. He becomes slightly nobler as a result though the demonstrated capacity for empathy takes some of the nihilistic despair out of the lines.

All in all, not a bad film. Polanski's is still a better representation of the play, Welles' is a better extrapolation.

A Leaf in Violent Winds

One fundamental difference one might point out between gangsters and terrorists is that terrorists are motivated by religion or ideology while gangsters, if they have an ideology or religion, may use their beliefs to justify or redeem their actions but essentially their work is unrelated to their spiritual life. 2009's Un prophete (A Prophet) is primarily a story about gangsters with a central character who happens to be a Muslim Arab. His two identities end up relating in ways neither a terrorist or a gangster would likely have been able to predict. With more than a few nods to Goodfellas, this film isn't as complex or realistic but it's not bad.

Malik (Tahar Rahim) has been in juvenile detention facilities most of his life for unspecified reasons when we meet him at the beginning of the film. We're introduced to him as he's introduced to prison, now being of age to graduate to proper incarceration.

He doesn't seem to fit in with the Muslims in the prison. One of their leaders, a man named Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), offers to get Malik hashish in exchange for oral sex, a deal the homophobic Malik refuses angrily. It occurs to the Corsican gangsters, led by Luciani (Niels Arestrup), that Malik would be a valuable ally. They use beatings and connexions in the prison staff to convince Malik to kill Reyeb.

Malik becomes member of the Corsican crew, even operating for Luciani outside of prison when permitted to go on furlongs. There's no indication that Malik feels any particular connexion to the religion he was evidently raised in but he watches the Muslims praying with curiosity and forms a friendship with Ryad (Adel Bencherif), an Arab prisoner dying of testicular cancer.

But Malik has visions. He's visited by Reyeb, the first man he killed, frequently in his cell so that his conversations with him become quite casual. Reyeb quotes prayers and makes observations about Allah, at one point spinning in place with his head back, calling to God repeatedly.

Mostly the film is a straight forward gangster tale told with competence. Tahar Rahim has the sort of posing coolness of Clive Owen in Croupier or Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. Malik's visions are the only really thing outside the box about the picture and what precisely they're meant to mean isn't clear. Perhaps it's simply to say that the truly chosen of God can't spotted by their upbringing, affiliations, or religious observance.

There is an innocence about Malik. He marvels unabashedly at beach sand and air travel. It's no surprise considering how long he's been locked up. So maybe he is chosen by God. It's interesting, then, that his loyalty to his friends has the flexibility typical for any gangster.

Bell in the Void

Absolutely no time to listen to Doctor Who audio plays this week but I saved one of the two I listened to last week. And you'd never be the wiser except I just told you.

The 2006 Sixth Doctor story The Nowhere Place isn't bad despite having been written by Nicholas Briggs. Briggs, who voices the Daleks and various other things for the television series and the radio plays, generally doesn't write anything good--maybe that's the reason he's never been asked to write for the television series. But then we'd have to account for Mark Gatiss. But The Nowhere Place is nice and eerie, the Doctor and Evelyn--and the presence of Evelyn always elevates Six's stories--find a peculiar doorway on a spaceship. People are drawn into it by the sound of a bell that comes from a 1950s steam train and, when they walk through the door, they're killed by something. It has so many of the elements that tend to make a good Doctor Who story--the danger, the anachronisms, the Doctor butting heads with military types, in this case a xenophobic Earth military at war with an alien empire.

They went through a whole subplot with Evelyn over the course of several audio plays where she had a heart condition. It wasn't especially good but it's a testament to the late Maggie Stables that the character remains so effective, particularly dealing, as she must, with the notoriously mediocre Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. With her, he's actually not bad, and maybe it is the mark of a good actor that they can make their costars look good. Evelyn is atypical not only for Doctor Who but for Sci-Fi/Fantasy in general in that she's an older woman. She's a history professor which naturally makes her an eager time traveller and she's the perfect foil for the bully Sixth Doctor. Not only does she seem stronger and smarter than him, she's capable of expressing greater vulnerability. He really is the companion in these stories.

From the Hollows Came Minds Cool and Cheeks Plump

A squirrel lays his plans for me at the trolley station to-day.

Who knows how much of the past forty eight hours he's been responsible for? I'm exhausted, having been up 'til 2am moving things to my new apartment. Then I had to get up at 7:30am for the cable guy only for him to tell me Cox won't enter a relationship with my modem until she's legally divorced from Time Warner. So I won't have internet until at least Monday--I'm at the university again now, waiting for one of the students to show up I'm scheduled to tutor.

I have so many books. So, so many books. I fill up a box with DVDs and knick knacks and can carry it easily. I fill the same box with books and I need a fork lift. It shows my devotion to the old, physical, bound paper things that I don't simply leave these at the dumpster and order them all for my Kindle.

Anyway, I may be scarce online over the next few days. Here's a lizard.

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An invisible diamond pattern stuck
The blue and grey old room, too thick with dust,
Concealing books with dragon legs untucked
Beneath the wings of steady, silent rust.
In quivers left beside the scaffold's ghost,
Black arrows dream of rain on bucklers bent,
The leather shoes and hands are cracked, the host,
Yet merry, drifts into a wood for rent.
The twins of green underground light revealed
The blond unveiling sky beneath the dome
Will blink before the swirling sauce congealed
Atop the nineteen forties goose's comb.
Ambition phased absent from stale coffee.
The rotary wrought mill dialled frothy.

Home is Where the Heat is

I think Punxsutawney Phil, if he lived in San Diego, would've said, "Not only do I not see my shadow, the concrete seems to be on fire." That was outside my apartment this morning--note the time as well as the temperature, 100 Fahrenheit before even 10am. February. It cooled to 82 when I drove two blocks which makes me glad I'm moving to a cooler part of town.

I'm going to be pretty busy to-night and to-morrow moving stuff to my new apartment, a two bedroom place in the building where my brother-in-law is landlord. So far this potato is my only room mate.

A sweet potato, actually, and she's not coming through with her part of the rent. So I need to find a humanoid room mate which shouldn't be too hard considering, having just been looking at apartments, I know they seem to be pretty scarce in San Diego. But if you're reading this and you're someone I like and you want to live with me and my potato I'll give you first dibs. Let me know and I'll send you details. If you're wondering how the neighbourhood feels about dogs and cats having sex with each other, this is a picture of the pet hospital a few blocks away:

I guess they take a page from the Marvin Gaye book of healing practices. Despite the convenient proximity of the interspecies sex clinic, I should say there are no pets allowed in the apartment building itself.

Here's a picture of the courtyard I took to-day:

Television Happens when the Cameras are On

I've always loved airports. For much the same reason I love shopping malls; I love microcosms. I like the feeling that things occurring at one end of the mall or airport are in some sense occurring in the same place as things occurring at the other end. So I was happy to find that the university I attend, San Diego State University, has a 24/7 study area in the library that feels very like an airport. It's indoor, it's crowded, it has plush seats, bad coffee, even a metal detector. I've been sitting here to-day for an hour already reading an article about airport surveillance for a class I've gotten a job tutoring in. I've scheduled meetings with students here for throughout the month. The class focuses on the rhetoric surrounding surveillance and that's certainly a subject that's been present in television I've watched lately. I've seen a few people refer to the new episode of The X-Files this week as a failure but I thought it was good.

Sure, it was a bit morally heavy handed. The scene showing the woman eating yoghurt and making coffee as though to show how insulated she was from the homeless she's supposed to be helping made me wonder how much yoghurt and coffee the makers of The X-Files consume. But I thought the avenging band-aid man was suitably creepy and his one man drawing-and-quartering jobs were pretty impressive.

I liked the little "Back in the day" exchange between Mulder and Scully where Scully refers to how she'd walk down scary staircases in heels "back in the day" and Mulder asserts, "'Back in the day' is now!" followed by a shot of their two flashlight beams forming an X. It's a hopeful little trumpet call I want to root for, especially reading interviews with David Duchovney and Chris Carter where they hint at wanting to do further seasons in the future.

I've also been watching Touch of Frost lately. I say "lately" when I mean, "Over the past three years." I've been watching it very slowly. I feel no compulsion at the end of one episode to watch the next yet I do find myself gradually acquiring the urge to and so, a month or two later, I do. It's an oddly relaxing show. Its leisurely yet focused stories wandering through some stock plots about drugs or tolerance coupled with the police bureaucracy with the exasperated, long suffering Frost at the centre. Something also about the 4:3 aspect ratio and the distinctly mid-90s lighting takes me back to sitting in my room watching television when I was in high school, even though I never heard of Touch of Frost at the time.

A couple nights ago, I watched the première of the fourth season, from 1996, called "Paying the Price", which feels slightly like a new direction for the series. Instead of an unknown villain at the end of a mystery Frost solves, "Paying the Price" reveals the villain right off, an angry young man named McArdy (Marc Warren) who kidnaps a woman named Pauline (Camille Corduri, Rose Tyler's mother from Doctor Who). As a result, the story becomes much more emotionally engaged as Frost grows increasingly angry and frustrated and Marc Warren delivers a pretty effectively psychotic performance. You really want Jack to nail this smug little shit.

There's sort of a competition of performances with David Jason as Jack Frost having someone he goes toe to toe with for once. It's sort of a Shatner/Montalbhan chemistry as I found myself wondering which actor's scenery chewing was going to be the more spectacular and therefore which actor would "win". Though both of them were much subtler about it than the Star Trek II leads. David Jason, I've read, originally worked in comedy and like many comedic actors--Bill Murray, Sarah Silverman--has turned those instincts rather effectively to drama.

Reactor Brain

You may not have diabolical intentions when you harness atomic power for new radar technology, but you may inadvertently be giving birth to a new species of mental vampires. So it's important to heed the lessons of 1958's Fiend Without a Face, a Science Fiction film about a paranoia that turns out to be pretty near the mark, demonstrated by some really great, creepy stop motion effects.

But the title of the film refers to the fact that you don't see the menace for most of the film. Taking place in and around a U.S. army base in Canada, the drama that began before the film starts is between the superstitious, rural locals and the U.S. military that's just trying to protect them from Communist missiles. The army base is blamed for nervous livestock and all manner of other things so of course when several people end up dead by means no-one can determine of course fingers point at he base.

One of the things I like about this film is that it really is more like a folk tale than the typical 1950s American Sci-Fi allegory about Communism. Possibly this is because, despite its setting and cast, this is a British film. We can't really say the invisible attackers are Communists as we could in Invasion of the Body Snatchers because the fiends appear due to attempts to protect the country from Communists. It more directly relates to the fear of nuclear power and the unknown implications, making the film more akin to Gojira.

There's a kind of oddly familiar relationship between the military and townsfolk and one wonders at the wherewithal of a U.S. military when a major has to borrow a flashlight from a civilian in order to explore a cemetery by himself.

The romance between Major Jeff Cummings (Marshall Thompson) and Barbara Griselle (Kim Parker) is also a bit ham fisted. Their meetcute is him walking into her house while she's in the shower because she'd left her door open and she's shocked when she steps out wearing only a towel and finds him in her living room. From then on, the two are irresistibly drawn together by her anger at his continual honest mistakes, giving the impression that their potential relationship is based entirely on her accrued karmic debt.

None of this takes away from the wonderful weirdness of the creature that is somehow the offspring of psychic experiments and atomic power, a creature who removes the brain and spinal cord from its victims. And who could fail to love the things when they do become visible, apparently having re-purposed the brains and spinal cords as bodies.

When they leap on people and wrap the spines like tails around victims' throats, it's easy to see they're likely precursors to the facehugger from Alien. But their perpetual squishy sounds are more reminiscent of the blancmanges from the Monty Python sketch while their snail-like eye stalks give them a charm all their own.

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A new neck co-opted the doggish cat.
Car batt'ry artillery twists copper.
A find revealed the founding cave of bat.
For ev'ry band the skull wears silk topper.
A bridge's girders must defend their rust.
Seagull programmes've tallied cellophane.
For ev'ry tick the stick has grown a bust.
You see, there's no address for Charlemagne.
Invoking Vader, Vikings close the gap
Or space, as some might call the void between
A boat and station keep, a cross on tap
So symbols step into the old canteen.
Regrets like hippopotami have sneezed.
There's more in moon seas than can be appeased.

Not All the Rice is Sweet

Once a crook, always a crook. This sort of thing is one of the basic, underlying philosophies of the Hays code. Though not quite spelled out, the morality in Hollywood films of the late 30s, 40s, and 50s tended not to allow a repentant criminal to live. So 1948's Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro) is a subversion of this. Made in Italy and part of the Neorealist movement, it eschews both Hollywood's morality and its philosophy of filmmaking with a movie that presents an unvarnished, beautifully realistic portrait of the women of northern Italy who sowed and harvested rice.

A radio announcer tells us early on that only women can do this job because it requires the same small, quick hands that handle needle and thread. Those familiar with Japanese films of the period may have been able to enlighten Italy on the the errors in this notion. But in any case, the film gives us an uncommon view of working women in the 40s that, incidentally, passes the Bechdel test, though I think people have a tendency to impute more significance to this than it deserves. Passing the Bechdel test simply means the film has at least one scene where two or more women have a conversation that's not about a man. In this case, there are plenty of conversations between women about rice.

But the relationships the two female protagonists have with men are quite crucial to the plot. The film is at its heart about two men and two women and involves a gradual exchange of partners. The women in this film are the more human figures, the people who make choices, while the men represent the inflexible moral poles to which they gravitate. It's natural, then, that the men are rarely present because the women need time in between their visits to form their identities. This is, in itself, a subversion and a rather feminist one. In a movie like Out of the Past or Not as a Stranger, the women are reflections of Robert Mitchum's choices. When he's good, he's with the good girl, when he's bad, he's with the bad girl. Riso Amaro presents the opposite situation with two women in Robert Mitchum's shoes. But unlike a suddenly repentant femme fatale as in Double Indemnity or a morally compromised noir hero as in Black Angel, the underlying rules, if there are any, for who has to die for changing her mind are different and more complex.

Francesca (Doris Dowling) and Walter (Vittorio Gassman) are lovers and a pair of thieves and as Walter is trying to flee some cops who've noticed he's stolen a necklace, he begins to dance with a woman amongst a group of the field hands waiting for the train to the rice fields. This woman is Silvana (Silvana Magnano, in her first role).

Widely considered the most beautiful and something of a leader figure, Silvana has a portable phonograph she dances to while everyone else just watches her. She's oddly glamorous for the group but takes a strong moral line when she notices Francesca, who hides among the crowd of field hands, is holding the stolen necklace. Silvana's boyfriend, Marco (Raf Vallone), is a soldier and she's mystified when he doesn't want to turn Francesca in to the authorities.

In the typical logic of the Hollywood film, Francesca might change her ways but only at the cost of her life. More likely, she'd remain a villain throughout the film. But as she starts to like the honest, hard working life in the rice fields, she finds she's just not wired like a stock movie character. Silvana is similarly not locked into the role of heroine and neither of the women are fated to stay with their respective boyfriends.

Even more than the plot, the film shows up the artificiality of Hollywood with its visuals. The on location shots of the flooded rice fields are fascinating as is watching the women's routine of planting, barefoot in rows, singing to each other conversations because they're not allowed to talk. In an environment like this, the forced moral contortions would have seemed particularly bizarre.

The Sex or the Crime

Adolescence may be described as the excitement of arranging your reality according to your fantasy and finding the unexpectedly artificial moments in sincere conversation. Or the unexpectedly sincere in the artificial. Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 film Band à part (Band of Outsiders) is perhaps the simplest and most innocent of his 1960s New Wave films. It's sweet and beautifully shot with charming performances from its leads.

Once again, Anna Karina stars though this role is very different from others she played for Godard. Instead of the cheerful stripper of Une femme est une femme or the pragmatic yet idealistic prostitute of Vivre sa vie, she plays Odile in Band à part, an innocent young woman who falls in with two young men, would-be thieves, she meets in an English class.

Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) seem to exhibit a love for film they don't explicitly discuss. As they're going back to their car in one scene, Franz pretends to shoot Arthur who immediately switches into performance mode, giving a typical, prolonged, writhing, death scene worthy of a John Ford western.

Odile mentions that a lodger in the house where she lives has a big pile of money hidden in his armoire, probably stolen, so they decide to come up with a plan to steal it themselves. Though all Odile really wants is to make out with Arthur. Karina looks constantly worried in this film and the impression you get is of a straight laced kid getting carried away with her hormone fuelled fantasy.

With Arthur and Franz feeling sort of like stand-ins for Godard and Truffaut, this almost feels like Godard's version of Jules et Jim but the relationships are less complex, the story more anchored to its plot. As usual, Godard deliberately draws attention to the inherently artificial, manipulative nature of film, mostly by abruptly stopping the music and sound effects, most notably in the film's famous dance scene where the three perform a complex routine while the music abruptly cuts in and out. When it's out, a narrator describes what each character is thinking and feeling.

The characters feel thus very exposed as the fragile, coaxing pretext of the music has been stripped aside. Odile wonders if the boys notice her breasts under her shirt and she seems to spend a lot of time thinking about how attractive she might be while the boys are busy competing for her and plotting the crime.

They ask her to take her stockings off and she does. They talk about how her thighs looked but what they actually wanted the stockings for was to use as masks. It's a neat encapsulation of their relationship--Odile's in it for the sex, Franz and Arthur think they're in it for the caper but also for the sex. The fantasy of the robbery is a necessary element for them to deal with their competitiveness. Only Odile seems aware of how horrible it would be to make the fantasy real.