Claire Denis’s Beau Travail is among the most highly praised films from a female director. Ironically, perhaps, Beau Travail (literally, Nice Work) is a film about men, male bodies, male psyches. That said, this is very evidently a film from “the female gaze”, and after all, the commission from which Denis worked was to explore “foreignness”.
Inspired by Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, it is set in East Africa, Djbouti, where Claire Denis grew up. Sgt Galoup (Denis Lavant) reflects back on his time in the French Foreign Legion, and in particular the impact of the handsome Sentain (Gregoire Colin) on the other soldiers, and on the commanding officer (Michael Subor). It is intrinsically a film about homosexual attraction, but no more explicitly than Melville’s novella. Physical and abstract, sensual and distant, the film climaxes with one of the most meme-d dance sequences in cinema, but the entire movie is a kind of militarized ballet of bodies in rest and motion (the score includes Benjamin Britten, Neil Young, and Corona’s disco anthem “Rhythm of the Night”).
Staff Pick: Epiphany & Savannah
A mesmeric, masculine ballet of beauty and confident power… What is really remarkable about Denis’s film is the way she succeeds in fusing the real and the dreamlike, the naturalistic and the figurative, into one visual conceit. Never for one moment does this shimmering, simmering emotional desert storm of a film relax its grip on your senses.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
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Claire Denis
Denis Lavant, Grégoire Colin, Michel Subor
France
1999
In French, Italian, and Russian with English subtitles
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Credits
Producer
Patrick Grandperret
Screenwriter
Claire Denis
Cinematography
Agnès Godard
Editor
Nelly Quettier
Original Music
Benjamin Britten, Charles Henri de Pierrefeu
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