For the first twenty or so minutes of “Bande à part” I fought a sinking feeling in my stomach that Godard’s banality-fest would leave me as cold as “Une femme est une femme” had left me almost a year ago when I happened to catch it on cable. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of my television set, alive with anticipation, words like “French New Wave” and “Godard” and “Cinema” rolling in my head with more than their native cleverness, I was surprised to find that Godard’s deconstruction of movie musicals became so tiresome that I was soon flipping channels, wondering if I would be struck down by a bolt of lightning for spurning one of the gods of filmmaking.

A good deal of the joy I took in “Bande à part”, then, was feeling, instead of that creeping onset of boredom, a glowing sensation taking root in the pit of my stomach and rising, as the film went on, hilariously and harrowing by turns, up to my heart, which, by the time Godard’s trio of criminals are acting out their inevitable fiasco, was ready to burst with jubilation. I haven’t seen such a merciless, tirelessly insolent, hilarious, and ultimately—at the edges, at the core, between the lines—humanly sympathetic movie in quite some time. Operating on two levels of masterful parody, the most obvious being the pulp crime novel, the lesser being the dramatic love triangle, the film manages to have a good deal of fun exposing the Quixotic delusions of its heroes, measuring the distance between art and reality with wit, postmodern nose-tweaking, and sheer visual coolness.

Godard’s finest joke in the film is his narration of what should be a critical dramatic moment: “It was clear that the world was falling apart around her”, he intones with careful importance, as the camera slowly pans over sleepy suburban Paris—hazy, still, and anything but falling apart. Odile, the heart of the matter, is somewhat indefinable. Loopy and clueless one moment, she can be sharp at other times, as when she brushes off the gent in the lavatory with that Renault line (surely that cannot have been translated properly, amusing though it is). She also sees reality more clearly, romanticized though her eyes are, than either Franz or Arthur. Early in the film, Franz mentions that Odile reminds him of a character in a novel; later, like everything in the film, it is defused when Franz reads her the beginning of the novel, which is (like their own actions) pointless, circular, and absurdly funny. Thematically, Godard picked the right joke, but I half expected Franz to have read from an older and decidedly more august book: Odile reminded me of a modern Emma Bovary. Flaubert’s marmoreal novel was a study of the dire infectiousness of literary romances cast in chilly realism, though, and, happily, Godard opts for a steady stream of clever comic touches.

Without the film’s sense of humor, it would be an unholy drag, and then some. It came as a relief to see that we would be spared yet another grim tale of disillusionment, a sentimental education culminating in some dreadful apotheosis of “the human spirit”. In its place are cafe dances, the subtextual love affair in the English class, the mud-caked Indy 500, and the dog keeping lazy tongue-lolling guard as the would-be robbers position the instrument of their thievery, a ladder, against the house in a brilliant wide shot that showcases subtle physical comedy that’s as good as it gets. Best of all is the outrageous duel between Arthur and his uncle, where the film’s building absurdity erupts in a scene of screwball humor juxtaposed with heartbreaking banality.

Equally spot-on is the intrusiveness of the narrator, Godard’s double, who frequently interrupts the proceedings with some grotesque purple passages from Dolores Hitchen’s novel “Fool’s Gold”, upon which the movie is based. As I know little about the genesis of “Bande à part”, I cannot say for sure whether Godard molested the narrative excerpts to bring out more fully their dreadfully pulpy style, or simply that they are the worst of the bunch and chosen for that reason; in either case, Godard’s ear for bad writing, like all great parodists, is a connoisseur’s, and the transpositions of text and image are delightfully incongruent.

Ultimately, “Bande à part” attempts to arrive at some sort of common, everyday, humdrum humanity as it stands in contrast to the world of books and films, a world which dominates the lives of Franz and Arthur (Odile’s romanticism is less easily explained, though just as salient, and it makes her a more organic, noble character than her suitors). The one “real” moment in the film, for me, is when Odile sings her song of empathy on the Metro train, for Odile shows, briefly, a genuine understanding of what, exactly, constitutes the existence the world shares with her. Godard seems to pose a question: How much more would we understand about ourselves if our films and our books were purged of the lies that lead us astray? I wish that modern movies asked that question. The lines between fantasy and reality have been fudged, if not eradicated completely, and, for all his “radical” tricks and cheats, almost forty years later Godard’s theme seems eloquent, sane, and more relevant than ever.

Ironically, Godard’s message, at first glance a call for realism (even at a chilled, Brechtian remove), is in fact at least two hundred years old, and finds its origins in the egalitarian romanticism of Wordsworth, who sought “a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents”. What makes “Bande à part” fascinating, therefore, is the tension between romanticism and realism, between escaping life through art and having life crushed into you. Odile’s song on the Metro is both a reaction against romanticism and an expression of it in the medium of a pop song, and I think Godard was admitting that there is no pure application of his aesthetic. “I’m tired of life”, says Odile, as she and Franz speed away from their squalid lives. Her recognition means little. They will not escape their lives, will never break free of the constraints under which they live; Odile seems to understand this when she randomly chooses to head south. After all, what difference does it make when you are merely choosing between one illusion and another?