To better judge the importance of Jean-Luc Godard's The Outlaw (1964) in the history of cinema, it is best to know that the film was filmed four years after the release of François Truffaut's The Pianist, and three years before Arthur Payne's Bonnie and Clyde. 
Outlaw, Outlaw and The Pianist are all low-budget French thriller black-and-white thrillers based on American crime, and have also been a box office disappointment on both sides of the Atlantic – although they are now considered by many to be classics of the French New Wave. In contrast, Hollywood's Bonnie and Clyde, which was profoundly influenced by these two films, was a huge success, and its poetic depiction of violence changed the tide of American cinema. 
All three films are a mix of tragedy and burlesque, violence and romance, with an uncertain emotional tone. When "Outlaw" and "The Pianist" were released, audiences didn't know how to understand the combination, but when they saw "Bonnie and Clyde," they were amazed. This is partly because "Bonnie and Clyde" is more appealing in color, star and release time, with stronger depictions of violence and a more direct narrative. In any case, the audience of 1967 was generally more receptive to it than the critics. 
It could even be argued that, while the French New Wave refused to appeal to the general audience, Bonnie and Clyde, a bizarre and playful tale of bank robbery, sparked such mixed reviews that a new cinematic postmodernism was born—a cynical rejection of the traditional crime film as a complete tragedy or comedy. Critics who criticized Bonnie and Clyde eventually embraced it. Pauline Kyle loved the film from the start, blamed her peers for not being able to appreciate it, and was thrilled to publish her first review chapter in The New Yorker. This long essay analyzes Bonnie and Clyde from multiple perspectives, pointing out that screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman learned a lot from Godard and Truffaut (in fact, Benton and Newman provided both directors with their own scripts). 
While Truffaut soon surpassed Godard as the public's favorite among the emerging French directors with very different styles, "Outlaw" had an even more profound impact on American independent filmmakers in the decade.
Jim Jarmusch's melancholy three-part film "Shadow of Paradise" is set in a small city and a suburb — two idle *** buddies and a shy young woman who smither them all over the world — and would have been incomprehensible without Godard's charming trio. 
When Godard's melancholy meets Hal Hartley and Quentin Tarantino, Godard's film transforms into a sign of style and autonomy: both Hartley and Tarantino are obsessed with the rambling Madison, the dance that Godard's three protagonists dance in a café – each in its own way, but paradoxically synchronized. Tarantino even named his film production company A Band Apart after the film's French name, Bande A Part. Godard's seventh film, shot in early 1964 over 25 days and costing $120,000, was a stark contrast to his previous expensive, star-studded Contempt. He seems to have deliberately shot the most lightweight film after his most expensive and repercussive film—the opening of the film, with a light piano tune, he casually and quickly switches to close-ups of the three main characters behind the credits. 
Manny Faber's promotion of termite art – as opposed to elephant art, is more concerned with the artistry of his own actions than with the audience – as evidenced by his assessment of The Outlaw's grim glamour of Godard's drizzling weather, the suburbs of Paris, and the three madmen running through the equally shady outlaw zone. This description contrasts sharply with the grandeur of elephant art and the gloomy magnificence of Scorn. But if you look closely at "Outlaws", you will find that this statement is wrong, or that this impression is too simplistic. 
The Outlaw is undeniable, and I often suspect that the film's popularity in mainstream American film critics has something to do with its lack of attention to political and social issues – something that characterizes Godard's films after this. His later film, The Married Woman, explicitly addresses these social issues; When one of his most recent films was released as the closing film of the New York Film Festival, some local critics predicted that after 9/11, Godard's anti-American film trend would become unpopular, tiresome, and out of fashion—as if audiences around the world would appreciate their solipsism more. "Outlaw" contains social elements, but you have to dig into it, and the anti-Americanism it contains is mixed with too many elements that clearly glorify American culture. In retrospect, the most amazing thing about this film is that even though it has many hilarious, joyous moments, it is such a painful and candid display of personal despair and disillusionment with hope. 
Godard himself acts as the narrator of the film, giving the audience a sense of his more intimate relationship with the three protagonists. Arthur (played by Claude Blesser) and Franz (Sammy Frey) are named after two of his favorite writers, Rimbaud and Kafka. They both lived bleak lives, with Rimbaud's machismo brutality and Kafka's shy personality seemingly representing the opposite of Godard's personality, respectively. It also makes it easier for the viewer to understand why Franz met Odil, a young country woman in an English class in Paris, who preferred one of Franz and Arthur, ended up with the other, and both of them were infatuated with Audir in their own way. (Rimbaud gave up writing poetry at the age of 19 and then roamed from Europe to Africa, most likely becoming a slave trader, while Kafka was a frail, neurotic patient who worked for an insurance company and feared his father.) The resemblance of the characters to the writer is also reflected in the resemblance of Blesser and Frey to their faces. ）
The Outlaw is even more deliberate in that Odil's full name is Odile Mono, which is Godard's mother's maiden name. In 1964, Godard said that the film was somewhat influenced by Georges Simmonon and Raymond Gno's "France with its pre-war atmosphere" in an attempt to recreate the poetic atmosphere of pre-war populism – an atmosphere he may well have associated with his mother, although in the interview he claimed that Odile got his name from Grieveau's book on the Surrealists. What's even more important to know is that Godard was not only married to Karina when he was filming Outlaw, but was also in love – so he devised a whole plot to see her walk or run. 
Anna Karina: I can't say that the misogynistic plot of most of Godard's other films has disappeared in this film; But when Arthur punches her out of anger with Odiille, the audience is more sympathetic to Odile, and Arthur's roughness exudes the machismo of his pre-war idol Jean Gabon. Unlike "A Woman is a Woman" and "Alpha City", in this film, Odil's full girlishness is by no means simply condescending, so the macho argument is suppressed by the sincere sympathy and respect for Odil.
In a way, Godard seems to resonate with her as much as he does with the two male leads—as in Exhausted," and critic James Naremore recently told me that Godard has projected himself onto Jane Sibble (like his fondness for Faulkner) and Jean-Paul Belmondo. That's no doubt why, no doubt, during the hilarious and unbelievable English class of The Outlaw, while the teacher (perfectly played by Danielle Girard) asks the students to translate the French Romeo and Juliet back into English, Arthur keeps sending love letters to Odile (whether he can lean against your chest, that's a question, and the more rude, Gaben-like hairstyle makes you look a little dirty)—Odile is almost the only student who looks like he's coming to the class.
Sitting behind her was a balding middle-aged man with glasses who had smuggled a small bottle of whiskey from a book-like box. The plot of the film is a standard failure: two weeks before the operation, Odile inadvertently tells Arthur that he has a large amount of cash stored in a tenant's suburban villa where she, his aunt, and the owner, Mrs. Victoria, live. So, with the reluctant cooperation of Odil, they planned to burglarize. In 1964, the comical gap between their plan (inspired by B-grade films) and the final implementation seemed all too commonplace. "The Big Man on Notre-Dame Street" was filmed six years ago, but the triumph of realism in films of this theme is another intriguing topic.
At the beginning of Outlaw, Franz and Arthur simulate a pantomime in which Pat Garrett shoots Billy the Kid with one shot, and Arthur rolls on the road, mimicking a look of pain that looks like it's real. Towards the end, when Arthur was actually hit by his stolen cousin, he was shot at least five times before staggering backwards, then falling in a spiral. His actions seemed so unreal that they seemed ridiculous. Obviously, this part of the film felt very dramatic to the audience when it premiered, and at that time the cinematic tradition also made an important distinction between the unreal (funny) and the real (serious). I remember the first time I saw the film in 1966, when it was screened at a movie theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan — the birthplace of many of Godard's imitations of B-movies — and I was both infuriated and bewildered and intrigued. If Arthur's feigned death had been more interesting and the real death more serious, the film's first screening in art cinemas might have lasted more than a week.
Five minutes into The Outlaw, Godard's narration autonomously completes the plot for the late audience: three weeks ago, a lot of money, an English lesson, a house by the river, a romantic girl. In fact, according to Godard's previous account of what Odier told Arthur to deposit, it must have been two weeks ago, which is actually a reference to Fritz Lang's nameless thriller film "Rising Tide Cabin"; When Arthur and Odile descend the stairs to ride the subway on Avenue Michel at Place de la Clichy, the film also suffers a narrative coherence error. Godard was always concerned with poetry rather than narrative. Later, Godard tells us that Arthur postponed the robbery until dusk in keeping with the tradition of bad B-movies — giving the trio enough time to run through the Louvre in 9 minutes and 45 seconds, breaking San Francisco's Jimmy Johnson record by two seconds.
Outlaw, and when one of them wants to be quiet in the café for a moment – a minute of silence that seems to last forever – the background sound is also obediently (or perhaps not so submissively) cut off, for more than half the time of silence, allowing the stark clash between the film's fantasy and reality to be relieved for a moment. The trio's famous Madison dance also achieved the intervals of the soundtrack through cross-editing. Equally striking features of the film are Jimmy Johnson's artistic appreciation, which Godard mocks and parodies through allusions—a succinct sketch of his ambivalent feelings about America, recalling Truffaut's description of Godard: he toiled through 40 books in one night at a friend's house, only to see only the first and last pages of each book. These are just the funny parts that most viewers remember floating on the surface of the film. But little attention has been paid to the anguish of suburban bleakness, boredom, unemployment, disappointment, and despair — all reflected in Raoul Courtal's gloomy weather, the dirty reflection of rivers in varying shades of gray, and the low, melancholy orchestral score by Michel Legrand (more so than the lighter jazz that appears in the film).
Most middle-aged viewers of Outlaw seem to attribute the film's antics to its youthfulness — a nostalgia for carefree days, but they forget that the film's sense of hopelessness is also part of youth. Knowing a little bit about Godard's early life can help us understand this despair. Godard's early life was as adrift and distressing as that of Rimbaud, Kafka, and Foucault, who were trapped by failure. It wasn't until around 1960, when he was almost 30 years old, that the ** movie he shot had just been released, and this life came to an end.
Godard, who grew up in Switzerland and Paris to parents who were doctors and bankers, became interested in cinema as a teenager, and his parents divorced around the same time. After that, he lived with his aunt and husband in Paris, stealing some of their money from time to time. A year later, his father decided to immigrate to Jamaica, where he continued to live after his father's return to Switzerland. Godard spent a year and a half traveling through South America – the final escape destination for the lovers of Outlaw – until his father no longer raised him. (The information ** was based on an essay written by Colin Myles Maccabe in 1922, in which he may have lost his authority as the official biographer of Godard, who may have lost his authority because of a sentence in the essay: Godard's spending a few nights on Copacabana Beach and his failure to use his status as a homosexual** to make money were precursors to his return to Switzerland and Paris, where he co-published the first issue of the Handbook of Cinema.) 」
Godard's petty theft apparently continued on his return to Paris to live with relatives, even as his mother helped him find a job at the fledgling Swiss television station. He was later imprisoned in Zurich for theft from a non-relative. His father locked him up in a psychiatric hospital for a long time after he ransomed him from prison. His mother came to his aid, helping him get a job with the Swiss dam construction team, and soon after, she died in a car accident in 1954. The dam became the subject of his first film, a short documentary, which he financed and began his film career. I know it's superficial and rash to tie Godard's personal background too closely to the emotional outpouring of Outlaw. But we need to make the right connections to tap into the beliefs behind the film's sentimental emotions — such as the sensitivity to failure and loneliness, even embodied in the clumsy dance sequences, which are inseparable from lyricism.
Godard perhaps best exemplifies this belief in the romantic rendezvous between Arthur and Odil—this time, the narrator is not Godard, but Odil, who half-chant and half-sing the poet Aragon's poems, beginning with their ride on the subway, and continuing with their voice, hovering over the subway, over the lonely and strange faces scattered in the Parisian night, until the scene cuts back to the scene where they lie on Arthur's bed, and the chant still drifts off the screen. The clip ends with Arthur and Odile telling each other their last names, which seems to represent the chaos of the individual and the universe; We find out that Arthur's last name is Rimbaud. The Australian film critic Adrian Martin aptly reminisced about Godard's more famous song allusions in his other films – most famously in "Woman is Woman" and "Pierrot the Mad Man", both starring Karina – and he even linked Godard's assessment of "Pajama Dance" in The Cinémathèque. What makes this clip so striking to me is that it intertwines love and loneliness – showing both ** and boundless loneliness at the same time, as if the two must be interdependent.