Waving to the French

Ah, those crazy Frenchies, at it again. This time, they're going to pull off a robbery. The gang that couldn't shoot straight, but with accents, The Band of Outsiders. The cute gal is Anna Karina, her boyfriends are Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey, and the director is the emobidment of French cinema's nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard.

Ah, callow youth! Squandering your time in darkened cinemas, what good will ever come of it? Invest that time on the golf course, you might become a pro; at the pool hall, you might become a hustler. At the movies? Memories that flicker and vanish! Cornichon feels like a sleeper cell, awakened four decades later by the Seattle International Film Festival.

The dance at the café, we've seen that before! The "minute" of silence, we've heard that before! Godard, we now realize, was a genius who made one life-changing film after another, seemingly without effort, films that passed into our collective lexicon of images, of how we once viewed the world, of how, even now, we still view the French.

It's a SIFF double bill; the other feature is Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Starts at 7:15 tonight, at McCaw Hall.

Here's that dance, by the way, decades before Pulp Fiction.