Gardez vos yeux d’enfant[clear]
Blogging Jean Luc Godard’s 1964 “Band of Outsiders”! Here we go. I’ve got a cup of hot coffee, and we’re deep into September. Perfect time of year for this particular Godard flick.
A Janus Film. Believe it or not they used to show Janus films like at 11 or midnight way back in the dark ages on PBS, which is how I saw a number of foreign films.
What fun titles. Some kind of tricked up raggytime jazz competing with fast, close-up chop chop cuts between Odile (played by Anna Karina), Franz (played by Sami Frey), Arthur (played by Claude Brasseur).
BANDE A PART.
No chance to observe anyone’s face very closely. All mood building. But watching one gets a hint of anxiety, of boredom.
Cut to overhead shot of a street, traffic directed. Black and white by the way. The movie is in black and white. A Mobil station in the background here. Mundane but interesting road views of Paris.
Now start a rather soft and sweet musical score which by the end of the movie will seem melancholy. With the appearance of the music enters also two men in a dark convertible. Cold gray day. Asking each other if there’s any news from Thompson & Sons? Yes, business is bad. “You scared? You think people have x-ray eyes? This is no time to get the jitters.”
So what’re these guys up to?
“There she is!”
A young woman on a bike passes before a set of signs. “C’est shell que j’aime”. “L’oiseau bleu”. “Simica 1300” “Goddard & Rimeau”.
Enter the narrator remarking that here begins the story, two weeks after he met Odile, Franz drove Arthur out to see “the house.”
The passenger in the car, Arthur, remarks to Franz, the driver, that the girl’s a looker and didn’t seem to recognize him. Well, no need to tell her they were going out there (to the house), says Franz. “Why not? It’s a free country,” says Arhur.
They stop, climb out of the car and to the soft music (has a stumbling sort of Satie pensiveness to it) they cross the street. Point across a river to a house. Odile lives there? No, out back of the gardener’s, Franz says. The woman lives there. “Maybe Odile too,” Franz corrects himself.
Beautiful soft grays, some incredible cinematography here, the wide range of tones, the men loitering in light fog between the fence along the river and the long line of winter, leafless trees that edge the avenue from here to the future and back. Arthur and Franz are concerned whether a particular door in the house is locked or not. As they look on, a. woman greets a man in the yard, they say Odile said he was from Moscow or Monte Carlo.
“You cozy with Odile?” Arthur asks Franz. No? Then he will have her when he wants her, he says, very confident of himself. They’ll come back to the house after English class.
As they wander back across the street to the car Franz pulls up his collar and talks of the day when Billy the Kid was shot by Pat Garrett, pretends to pull out a gun and shoot Arthur who falls in the middle of the street. Arthur writhes in his death throes, grabs for the car, pulls himself up then leaps in. A hint of rivalry concerning Odile. A hint of the old Godard mythic foreboding, destiny’s mind made up and already licking its chops at the far end of the film stock.
Narrator: “Had Franz really stroked Odile’s knee…” Yes, and she had soft skin.
Now you know, as if you didn’t sense it going there, it’s a love story. Maybe. Two thieves and a girl. And an English class.
Narrator: “For latecomers: Three weeks earlier. A pile of money. An English class. A house by the river. A romantic girl.”
Close-up on the letter’s LOUI’S SCHOOL and brief sprint of jazz.
No, no flashbacks. All still present day. Odile arrives at the school. Then Franz and Arthur. Run up the stairs to the class which is several tables crammed in a small room. The teacher reprimands Arthur and Franz for being late. Hands out notebooks. “You know that the director Mr. Loui is an advocate of modern methods, but we mustn’t forget that….” the teacher chalks Classical=modern on the blackboard, “for as Eliot said, Odile?”
Odile’s mind is obviously elsewhere, perhaps on Franz. She answers, “Everything that is new is thereby automatically traditional.”
Just the kind of line you’d expect in a Godard film, perhaps referring to the new French cinema movement he’d helped found, often called Nouvelle Vague.
The teacher tells them they don’t need to know how to say where is the toilet or a room with a bath, but “Thomas Hardy or Shakespeare.”
Arthur slips into a table where he can better watch Odile while the teacher says she will read from “Romeo and Juliet” and they are to translate it back into English. It is to do with Juliet’s seeming death by poison and Romeo’s discovery of her.
They are adults but behaving like school children. Arthur writes a note and passes it to Odile. “Tou bi or not tou bi contre votre poitrine, it iz ze question.”
Odile in her knee socks and flats and school girl plaid skirt and pig tails glances about somewhat embarrassed. Arthur next writes her that her hair looks old fashioned. Odile looks crushed, then in an attempt to please him, but perhaps also revealing her lack of self-confidence by her manner, takes down the pig tails. The camera cuts between the three looking at each other and we recognize it is from this scene that’s taken the rapid series of cuts that ran under the title at the beginning.
“O fortune, all men call thee fickle,” says the teacher. Now she collects the papers, allotting the class a ten minute break and Franz fairly grabs Odile to rush her out the door.
The uniquely Godard touch…a middle-aged man who’d been drinking, as he exits, sweeps his hand in appreciative outline of the teacher’s rear end as she collects the papers She hardly seems to notice, nor does the student with whom she’s talking. But it seems a punctuation mark made for us. Something we’re supposed to think about, what this man has done, what it means on views of women and sex. And I’ll go ahead and note that watching the film as a whole is very different from watching it in pieces. I at first saw it in pieces, stepping in and out of the room while Marty was watching it. Watching the scenes isolated, seeming social commentary seemed to come across very strong. Watching it as a whole, not so much as one is involved in the personalities and the plot. When one walks in and sees isolated scenes of how the men treat Odile, the action has been shot in such a way that one is easily able to view it as commentary on manipulation and violence, on women made into objects by men and their powerlessness. Every scene is adeptly realized as a story in its own right not only through the writing and camera’s perception but via the brilliance of Anna Karina, her ability to act in the moment.
On the stairs, Franz introduces Odile to Arthur. She is absolutely drawn to Arthur or appears to be. Franz has on his dashing gangster hat, his striped flannel suit. Arthur hasn’t the cinematic good looks and is wearing his outdoors coat in the building as his jacket is at the cleaners and he hasn’t the money to get it out, yet it’s Arthur to whom Odile is attracted, She bluntly refuses Franz’s offer of a cigarette and takes Arthur’s. Franz stalks off. Odile coughs, which seems to prove she’s obviously an innocent not used to smoking.
Arthur tells Odile she ought to drop the English class, that it will get her nowhere. The pessimist. Now he finally tells her his name, Arthur. She asks him if something is unusually wrong and he says that it’s nothing more than usual, doesn’t she have troubles? No, she says Madame Victoria just wants her to learn a trade, to be a nurse, but she doesn’t want to be a nurse, she hasn’t the patience or kindness. But English? It’s very exciting. This is an idea that Godard uses a lot, such as in “Masculine-Feminine”, the attraction of French youth to what seems an exciting, explosive American culture.
Arthur says he would have been a nurse and been nice to an old guy and inherited his money. Odile retorts that’s an awful thing to say. Arthur agrees. He fondles her bottom as she steps through a door and then chucks her softly on the chin, cheering her up. He tries to talk her into sticking around with him after class but she says no, she has to get back to Madame Victoria. What about if she told her Aunt there was a specialized class in English? No. Franz passes through. The bell rings for them to go back to class. Odile is concerned about Arthur acting like she’s betrayed him, turning him down and wonders what they could do as there’s no time for dinner or dancing. He says he’d give her a ride to her home and she says she’d prefer taking her bike. He says they could sit in the car and listen to he radio. Oh, she’s not allowed to do things like that, she says.
“Have you ever kissed a guy?”
“Oh, sure…”
So he says let’s kiss. She seems never to have kissed as she closes her eyes and sticks out her tongue. Confident he’s won her, Arthur tells Odile to get Franz and come down to the car.
The narrator comments he would say something about how Arthur and Franz feel but that it’s fairly obvious. The car now zips down the street in a light rain with Odile seated between Franz and Arthur. It’s Arthur’s car, a Simica, and Franz says one day he’ll have a Ferrari and race it at Indianapolis. Arthur asks Odile if she’s sure the money’s at the villa and she says she doesn’t know. He asks if she’s now doubting things and she smiles, takes Franz’s gangster hat and pops it on her head. Fun & games, she examining the effect in the mirror as the camera switches to looking on from behind, as Franz takes back his hat, as her hair blows in the wind, as the music starts again, as she begins to protest now she had only mentioned the money to Franz for conversation, that it would be crazy to steal it, that they can’t do it. But she admits she is trembling with excitement.
They pull up not at the house but near it, on the Isle of Ravens, to drop off Odile. Who lives at the house? Mr. Stolz, Madame Victoria and the gardener. Odile asks them to stay at the car, she’ll tell the Madame she’s going shopping, and then she’ll come back. As she rides off, Arthur says she’s an idiot.
And, uh, she is, but so are they all.
The impression we’re given of Odile is that of a naive girl who doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut and will give out any kind of information to impress. A girl who’s easily bent to submitting to the will of others. Is this the impression we’ll retain at the film’s end?
Odile enters the villa. “Aunt Victoria!” Yes, she’s there. We hear but don’t see her respond. Odile sneaks silently upstairs.
Outside, elsewhere, waiting for Odile, Franz is driving the car in circles in the mud while Arthur chases him, yelling he’ll never win at Indianapolis.
Quiet, all’s quiet, Odile in Stolz’s upstairs room looking about. An armoire. Money. Lots of it. Close up shots of the money. Close up shot of Odile, smiling, Film Noire music. Crime! Mystery! I could smell that old armoire as soon as she opened it. Hint of mildew in the attic room. Old cedar from the armoire. You’re young, boxed in, eager, never been kissed, some ridiculous, bad news creep has his eye on you and imagining yourself in Hollywood’s book of plots fills one’s world with sweet drama! Oops, Auntie’s calling! The music stops. Odile runs to answer.
Things, I’m thinking, are much more complex than this. They have to be. She too pointedly turned down Franz’ cigarettes. She was too intensely and quickly attracted to Arthur.
Back to Arthur and Franz pretending to be on the Indianapolis speedway, fooling around in the mud.
The aunt appears and wants to know if Mr. Stolz’s driver is around. No he’s not. Aunt takes off her sweater. She’s in a somewhat low-cut dress with a long string of pearls, dangle earrings, bouffant hair. She complains that the boss will get mad one of these days. Odile looks perplexed. Is Mr. Stolz the boss? (Another question. Who’s the boss?) Putting on an evening coat, the aunt asks if Odile is still seeing “that boy”. Franz? No, Odile lies and says he quit the class, that he said England was done for, that the Chinese are going to win. The Aunt says one day she’ll check to make sure Odile’s not going to the movies, theater, out for dancing, on the boulevard. Nervous, gawky, Odile says she hates all those things. She says she loves nature and her face lights up. Her aunt says she’s going to a reception at the Albanian embassy and goes upstairs. Odile calls out that she’s taking 1000 francs to go shopping. The aunt, returning, asks if Odile has been in Mr. Stolz’s room. Odile says never. The aunt says something’s out of place, she can’t figure it out. Did he ask to have a jacket cleaned? (We are reminded of Arthur saying he wasn’t wearing his jacket as couldn’t afford to have it cleaned.) Odile kisses her goodbye and runs off.
Outside to the rear. Odile runs with her bag in which she put the 1000 francs and what appeared to be a slab of meat. A slab of meat? She races through yards.
Arthur is reading a newspaper article about a woman who’d stabbed her artist lover who wanted to be alone. Franz reads aloud an Orleans news article about a woman found dead with an infant and a man seen in a black Chevrolet. An article about a lumberjack complaining his wife treated him like a servant, but he didn’t murder her, she ran away. More stories of murder. Abuse, violence, betrayal.
Throughout the readings, shots of Odile climbing this and that ladder over stone and masonry fences as she races along to meet the men. What had the meat been for? Now we see. Odile runs through the camp area of what appears to be a small circus or carnival. She calls for Rajah. A tiger is led up on a restraint. She throws the tiger the piece of meat and runs on. Uhm, Odile seems actually a bit braver than we might believe her to be.
More newspaper readings between Arthur and Franz. Massacres in Africa. Hutus cutting off the legs of Tutsi masters to bring them down to size. 20,000 victims in the Rwanda River.
Odile has reached the river. Still racing along with girlish excitement to sounds of light jazz, she climbs down to a dock, steps on a boat, lets it float to the other side, climbs up the levee to meet the men who are speculating that the money at the villa could be as much as 20 million. They wonder why she told them about it and agree again that she’s an idiot.
Odile arrives, Arthur says they need to discuss a plan and Odile vanquishes the hidden camera now by speaking to it and saying, “Why?” The narrator says that a thought crosses her mind that she will always be like a shadow masking Arthur’s field of vision, an ocean of indifference between them. The three drive off , soft music playing.
A cafe. Arthur sits next to Odile. Again she takes his cigarette but not Franz’s. She’ll have a Coke. When Arthur goes to get the drinks, Franz takes his place. Odile discloses to him she’s seen the money and is scared–but she didn’t look very scared when she was looking at the money. She says he shouldn’t have told Arthur. Served their drinks by a waiter, Arthur says Odile has a run in her stocking and while she’s looking for it he pours his liquor into her Coke, to get her drunk. They discuss Stolz’s room and the men tell Odile that she’s now an accomplice. She begins to cry. Arthur mentions something about love and there’s no reason to worry, better to be rich and happy than poor and unhappy. When they say they should do the job tonight, Odile says no, tomorrow or the day after when Stolz has a reception, she doesn’t know which day.
“I love you yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” she suddenly sings, brusquely, despondently, as if to reply to Arthur speaking of love, and leaves the table. Now Arthur and Franz end up sitting on the same side of the two tables. And we can see Odile in the mirror behind them, looking back at them. Franz gestures, waving her away, and she goes. The men wonder why Stolz leaves his room unlocked and they speculate, based on an American book one of them read, that sometime it’s best to hide things in plain view.
Odile wanders downstairs to the billiard room. Goes into the restroom where propped up is a magazine open to an article titled, “Gardez Vos Yeux D’Enfant”. There are three pics of a woman that look very familiar to me but I can’t place them. Chantal Goya, star of the later “Masculine, Feminine” (1966), is applying her eye make-up, looking in the mirror, just as she will in the scene from “Masculine, Feminine” when Paul is talking her up in the bathroom, trying to get her opinion on things, voicing his interest in her and she was almost entirely dissociated, so caught up in her reflection, in love with image and fantasy. “It’s not only your looks but your happiness too, good eye care depends on you,” Chantal reads from the magazine and examines her face in the mirror. A man appears and when Odile comes from out of the toilet he asks her to join them, which references the future triangle love (or non-love) relationship in “Masculine, Feminine”, which will be two women and Paul, whereas in this move we have two men and a woman, many scenes seeming deliberately to recall Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim”. Odile asks him if he has friends at Renault and when he says no she says that is too bad because he could have traded his dumb looks for a car, and out she goes.
Odile returns to the table. She takes a peculiar little instrument, two spheres connected by a tube, fluid half-filling one of the balls. She has Arthur take one of the balls. She acts puzzled when the fluid doesn’t flow to the other ball as she says it should. (We suspect that this indicates that Arthur doesn’t love Odile.) What to do now? Franz suggests that since they can think of nothing they should have then a minute of silence. Odile counts it down and the film goes silent.
Mum.
I think there’s more to do with it than playing with the audience. A moment of silence is usually given to do with death.
Will a full minute pass? I don’t know. I’m not going to time it. Whatever, it does seem a very long time as they said it would be. Now the sound is back on and Franz says he’ll put on a record. Odile complains about Franz following Arthur everywhere and Arthur says it’s to protect her from anyone taking a shot at her. Odile and Arthur get up to dance.
“Empires crumble, republics flounder” a drunk says wandering by.
Arthur, Odile and Franz take the floor and do their dance routine, the Madison, Odile wearing the gangster hat. The music disappears, they continue dancing while the narrator intrudes and says now it is time to discuss the heroes’ feelings. The music comes back on. Everyone is smiling as they dance, soft sweep and clap, even Franz. The music cuts off and to the soft shoe sounds the narrator describes Arthur thinking of Odile’s kisses. Music on. Then music off and the narrator describes Odile wondering if the men notice her breasts moving under her sweater. Music, on, off and the narrator describes Franz thinking of “everything and nothing”, wondering if the world is becoming a dream or vice versa. Music back up as they continue to dance to the plucky guitar and organ-driven jazz, horns singing. Finally Franz tires and leaves Arthur and Odile on the floor. Then Arthur tires. Odile is left by herself, grinning, happy. Then suddenly stops with a frustrated look.
Exterior night scene, traffic, bright lights. The narrator relates that Arthur tossed a coin to see who would get Odile. Arthur and Odile called heads and the coin showed tails and Franz drove around feverish.
Narrator: “Meanwhile, on the city outskirts, Arthur told Odile he once met a man who walked this way…”
Cut to hilarious long shot of Arthur doing a contorted walk as he strolls with Odile alone on a sidewalk before a store. Come to a sign of “armex automatiques” and guns on a table outside. Arthur asks how much is the mauser. It’s two francs. He does some target shooting. Odile asks him how he’d feel if a man was in his sights and he says if the man was the target he’d be dead. She seems not very bothered by this. She asks him not to take advantage of her, that she loves him. They walk along through the neon lit square and then down “to the center of the earth”. The subway. She asks if he changes girlfriends often as Franz said he had a new one everyday. Arthur says nothing, just plays with her face affectionately. She asks what he sees in her and he asks the same. She says she sees a husband. He rolls his eyes. Is that what interests her? Odile remarks on how the people on the subway look sad and lonely and there’s commentary on how they appear differently according to the stories of the people observing. Say a man with a package is carrying a teddy bear to a sick daughter and he will be believed to look different than if he’s said to be carrying TNT. Odile begins to sing a sad song that this reminds her of. “What are they doing to you men and women, tender stones, worn down to soon, broken appearances.” A shot of a homeless man on the sidewalk. Odile turns to the camera and sings, “My heart goes out at the sight of you”
“Liberte Sorties” reads the subway sign before which they stop.
“Things are what they are…I’m just like you, a grain of sand…” Odile continues to sing and with her looking at the camera the actress conveys a sincerity that doesn’t break character, that makes Odile more real, more immediate, as if she is now someone you are sitting beside on the subway. Odile has said she doesn’t have troubles but she is graver than initially represented.
Cut to shots of different people in the morning light as she sings her song of being like everyone else. Of Franz too, lying asleep in his bed. Odile and Arthur asleep in Arthur’s bed, she smiling. Now Arthur is seeing her out to the street and he asks her family name. Monod. He says it’s the wrong tone. He says he’ll see her that night. She says no, it’s too risky so they agree on the next.
She climbs into a taxi which takes her away. The narrator says had Franz been there he’d have seen by her expression she was thinking of events, not men. Which says something about Odile.
Now Arthur is going back to his quarters and suddenly a man, then a woman, rush him, ask who was that girl, who, tell them, they need that money they say, then a third man rushes up and proceeds to try to beat Arthur up. They fight. “Don’t mess with me, I did Indochina,” the man says. So Arthur says as a condescension to his uncle that he’ll pull a job with him the next night and he promises not to tell Odile or Franz. He enters his apartment through the kitchen. Washes his face. Takes a gun out from under the sink. Another. Puts one back. He says the situation’s clear enough, but what isn’t clear is the part he plays in it.
Now he is running to meet Franz at a basketball court. He tells Franz they must do the job tonight. That he shouldn’t have blabbed to his uncle. Neither Odile nor Franz seem to know how to keep their mouths shut.
They go to find Odile at a typing class she takes but she’s not there. Franz finds her outside. She says she’s afraid of him because he looks tense and cruel. He tells her they’re doing the job tonight. She says it’s too risky as she forgot to put the man’s coat back when she went in his room and her aunt discovered it. He reassures her it will all be over in two minutes, that she only has to stand watch at the door. But she’s concerned about what Stolz will say when the money is missed. He tells her to think something up. He says he regrets that Odlie had told her aunt about him as she may suspect him. She says she’ll leave with the both of them and he says no, they have to split up, that she will leave with either him or Arthur. She asks, “Where will you go?” He says he’s going to Jack London country and proceeds to relate to the camera a Jack London story about an Indian who always lied so the people sent him away, and how when he came back he told them about trains and planes and they said he was a liar and sent him away for good.
He says if she was with him he’d go to South America. He says that she’ll buckle under Mr. Stolz’s questions and she says she won’t. He says she’ll get the seesaw, go up and down, skirt over her head and in two days she’ll give them away. She protests that she won’t.
The three drive off down the road. Opposite the Louvre, Franz buys a book that reminds him of Odile. Odile doesn’t know what the Louvre is as she asks what the building is.
Franz reads from the book that reminds him of Odile.
“Anglares began to tell a moving, stupid and somber tale.” A man goes to a hotel for a room and gets room 35. He goes down to the clerk and says that he has a bad memory so every time he comes in he will tell the clerk his name, Delouit, and the clerk is to tell him his room number. He returns and is told his room number. Then he comes in bloodied, unrecognizable and gives his name as Delouit. The clerk says Delouit already went up and the man says yes but he fell out of the window, now what is the room number.
He closes the book.
Arthur says in keeping with bad B movies they will wait until nightfall to pull the job. Odile asks how to kill time in the meanwhile? Franz says he heard of an American who did the Louvre in 9 minutes and 45 seconds, so they decide to do one better.
Next shot they are all three running through the Louvre.
They did the Louvre in 9 minutes and 43 seconds breaking the record of Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco.
They set off for the Villa at Joinville.
Narrator: “The water was stagnant, a taste of ashes in the air…”
They drop off Odile and ask what door to use. Now Odile is the one frustrated by stupidity. She complains she has to tell them everything twice and that they are to use the back door. Arthur orders her to take off her stockings. Franz tells her not to frown as it’ll give her wrinkles. They take the stockings and Odile goes to the villa.
Franz tells Arthur he felt sorry for her when she asked about afterwards. Arthur says no, they’re saving her from a life time of drudgery. The two men cross the river to the Villa. As they make the other side, Arthur says she had told him that she and Franz weren’t lovers. Franz says that she’s a liar. At least I think it is Arthur who says this and that it’s Franz who says she’s a liar, for this matter of lying has been raised a couple of times in the film and I’ve not noted it. Odile had remarked on her lying once in a conversation with Franz and he had remarked also in another conversation on his lying, and the audience was left to wonder what’s up, what’s the lying about.
Obviously, Odile isn’t as innocent as all that, is she? Lying to her aunt? But we feel sympathy for her there, nervous Odile kept pinned down under her aunt’s thumb. We don’t mind so much her lying to her aunt. And she had berated Franz for telling Arthur about the money, so apparently they’re not in some sort of conspiracy to end up running off themselves while leaving Arthur stuck and in trouble?
The men put the stockings on over their faces and run through the back yard to the house. Odile washes her hands in the kitchen. Arthur enters through the back door. The house is strangely empty. For a villa, there’s not much furniture. A picture sits on a floor. Arthur wanders by a metal bookshelf on which there is a selection of items and takes a book and puts it in his pocket. Franz enters through what seems a basement door. They look around for Odile, calling her a stupid bitch. Then they find her in the same room, so she has certainly heard them talking about her. She says that aunt is in the bathroom. They ask her about the dog and she says she told the dog not to bark. She now has on knee socks and is carrying a book. She asks Franz why he’s holding his stomach and Arthur says because he kicked him because he was scared. She tells them the room is at the end of the hall upstairs. Franz takes her hair ribbon. She says she has something to tell them but Arthur binds her mouth shut with the ribbon and Franz ties her hands behind her back. Franz goes upstairs. Arthur remains downstairs, checking himself in the mirror. Franz comes back down to complain the door’s locked. Arthur runs upstairs and checks and finds the same. Odile says that she’d wanted to tell them Stolz was suspicious. Now she’s irritated, saying they should have had a ladder ready. And yet she seems to make a run for it, or does she? They catch her too easily. She says there’s the ladder in the garage. They release her, untie her hands and they all go outside, the men still in the stockings. She gets the keys and they go around to the room’s window.
Long shot as Odile sits with the dog, the men struggling to use the ladder but they’re having a difficult time. An almost comic routine. Arthur climbs the ladder and struggles to open the window but it’s locked. Franz tells him to break it. Coming back down Arthur attacks Odile and starts to beat her up, calling her an idiot. Franz protects Odile from Arthur and tells him not to touch her. She runs to the other side of the house, Franz following, then Arthur. Arthur asks if she’s mad at him and she says he didn’t have to hit her, she was as surprised as they that the room was locked. Arthur tells her to find the key by the next day and that the door better be open. He walks off. Franz remains beside her, attempts to comfort her, then also leaves.
The narrator remarks on how Franz would have given anything to console Odile, it obvious her world was crumbling around her.
Go to a shot of the rooftops of Paris under heavy clouds. Jazz music again.
The men driving along the river, Odile standing on a balcony of the villa overlooking the river, is smoking as if it’s second nature rather than a habit to which Arthur recently introduced her. She sees them as they approach and park right in the yard and she runs inside. Franz says they’ll be spotted but Arthur puts a badge on the car reading TV Reporters and says to just say they’re TV, that’s Open Sesame. They run up and in through the door and Odile comes around front to stop them. She says it’s no good now, that they left traces with the ladder and that now all the locks have been changed. She begs them to leave but they push their way in. She screams for help, her Aunt entering in her bathrobe. She begs them not to hurt her aunt. They ask the aunt for the key. The aunt says they can’t frighten her, that Arthur’s gun isn’t loaded. He shoots it at a wall and she takes the key from behind a picture and gives it to him. They take Odile’s hair ribbon to tie up the aunt and the aunt asks if Odile knows them. Odile says she doesn’t. They send Odile for cotton and before they stuff it in the aunt’s mouth the aunt tells Odile she had trusted her. They put the aunt in a large armoire. They tell Odile to say the aunt went to see someone and then clear out as soon as she can.
Franz stays downstairs and asks Odile why she doesn’t love him, says he longs to hold her. Arthur comes back down and calls them up. The money’s gone except for a small bundle.
Shot of Arthur’s uncle and the others he’d promised to do a job with coming out of their building.
Arthur and Franz search the room looking for the money. Downstairs, a close-up on a portrait on a wall of a woman, seems a very sad expression, but what is most interesting is it’s a double exposure, that double exposure mostly shown in her eyes. They find a little more money in the tub, in Odile’s room. The men are now downstairs searching. Arthur tells Franz to search the refrigerator and he comes back with a small bundle. Odile says there was much more. What the hell is up with her–yelling for help and then instead of letting them believe they’d gotten it all she reveals there was much more money. Arthur says they’ll get the old lady to talk. They open the closet and find the aunt has died, she’s no longer breathing. Actually, Arthur says she’s fainted. Then Franz checks and says that she’s dead, no longer breathing. When Arthur moves to check her again, Odile throws herself between Arthur and her aunt and wails about them having killed her.
Franz grabs up the grieving Oldie and drags her out of there. Outside, Arthur stops to look at the track they had left with the ladder. It runs straight back from the house across the yard. (But they had dragged the ladder out of the basement and around the house.) They drive off then Arthur says “in an odd voice” that he wants to go back and check to make sure if the old lady was really dead. They arrange to meet him at a Cafe. As they drive down the highway, Franz sees the uncle’s car, has a dark foreboding and determines to do a U-turn and follow him though Odile begs him not to.
Ok. If Odile and her aunt and Franz had cooked up something to get Arthur in trouble then seems to me that Odile wouldn’t be protesting that Franz shouldn’t turn the car around.
Odile and Franz run up a street along the yard of the house to look down on it. Arthur is pulling mounds of money out of the dog house when his uncle comes out from under a tree and shoots him. Arthur’s uncle repeatedly shoots Arthur as Arthur approaches him. Arthur shoots his uncle. Arthur’s uncle falls dead under the tree and then Arthur staggers around in backwards circles for a while, rather in the same kind of grotesque comic walk he’d done for Odile before looking at the mausers, and tumbles over. The narrator says that his last vision was of Odile’s face.
“As a dark fog descended on him he saw that dark bird of Indian legend, which is born without feet and thus can never alight. It sleeps in the high winds and thus is only visible when it dies. When its transparent wings, longer than an eagle’s, fold in, it fits in the palm of your hand.”
Odile and Franz rush down but Arthur has died. They flee as a car pulls up, presumably Stolz who gathers up the money and goes up to the door where the Aunt meets him, still alive. Franz and Odile run.
In the car, driving down the highway, Odile tries to cover Franz’s eyes but he stops her. He asks if she wants them to die and she says yes, that life’s disgusting. He says they didn’t make out so bad. She says she feels terrible. He says he does too. She asks if Stolz will call the police and he says not likely if it’s money he stole from the government (she had said earlier she wondered if he was evading paying taxes).
Franz remarks, “Isn’t it strange how people never form a whole…they never come together, they remain separate, each goes his own way, distrustful and tragic…”
Franz asks Odile if she heard what he’d said, that he wanted to hold her. Yes. He asks and yet she is still sad? Odile concedes she doesn’t feel sad now so much as tired with sorrow and fatigue.
Franz asks Odile to decide where they should go.
The prologue shows Odile and Franz on a boat headed to South America, recalling Chaplin’s “The Immigrants”. They look innocent and light-hearted. Odile wants to know if there are lions in South America. Yes, and croc-Odiles. Franz asks how Odile thinks of him and she replies just like men think of women, their eyes, their legs their breasts, women think of men in the same way. Odile offers Franz the same test that she gave Arthur and the love-test device shows that Franz does indeed appear to love her. A test that Arthur had failed.
So, do we purchase Odile’s innocence or not? Forget the primary story of the 2 bumbling gangsters and the dreamy girl who talks too much. There are enough references to deceit that one really should take several look-agains at Odile’s character and question her motivations and wonder at who is manipulating who. But it seems to me one of the things Godard is working with here is, whatever is going on with her, there’s a split between how Odile sees herself and the person she indeed is. Not only is lying brought up several times, Odile not rebelling against this judgment of her character, there are some discrepancies between how she presents herself to others and the little we’re permitted to see of her when she’s alone. Perhaps it’s only a matter of each having their own secret agendas of which even they may be only dimly aware, if that cognizant, which becomes the substance of oracle, the knowledge of the flip side’s guiding hand. But then there’s that track left by the ladder (a track the men seem to have not left) which Godard never explains.
Even Arthur remarks on how he doesn’t know what is his place in the story which shows some doubt as to what is actually going on with the others. And Godard has told us that how a person is viewed has a great deal to do with the story that’s presented to us of them.
A vaguely interesting aside, Odile Monod was also Godard’s mother’s name. I read that her family attempted to cool her relationship with her future husband and sent her to Britain for medical studies. But Godard pursued her and they ended up marrying.
There is another approach one can take to “Band A Part”, a level of reflection on action and reaction that may be an appropriate place to maneuver about the film. The story of Saint Odile (word origin is Germanic, meaning wealth) has variations but the main staple is that she was born blind. Her father wanted to kill her, either not wanting a girl or refusing a blind child, but she was sent her away to be raised in a monastery, recalling the story of Oedipus who is sent away as his father fears the oracle in which he is given as slain by his son. (We have no idea in Godard’s story what has happened to Odile’s parents.) When she was baptized she miraculously regained her sight. Her younger brother brought her home, was killed by his father for it but Odile brought him back to life then fled and hid in a cavern which miraculously opened to her. Her father attempted to pursue but was hurt by falling rock. Later, Odile nursed her father and he is said to have given up his opposition to her. She founded monasteries, a hospital and became the patron saint of eye diseases, which is referred to directly in the bathroom scene where Goya is applying the eye make-up and reading from the magazine article on attention to the care of the eyes. “Gardez Vos Yeux D’Enfant” is the name of the article and it could be taken as referring to this blind infant Odile who lives in a sort of seclusion with her domineering aunt. Odile who was concerned with how Arthur would view a man through the sight of a gun.
Odile may or may not have something to do with Saint Odile, whose very being is “wealth”, and some times things are best hidden in plain sight, as the movie says.
Gardez Vos Yeux D’Enfant.
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