Beau Travail

Prior to 2022, no films by women directors cracked the top ten in Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Ever Made poll. This time, there were two: Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman and Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (which came #7). Ironically, perhaps, Beau Travail (literally, Nice Work) is a film about men, male bodies, male psyches. That said, this very evidently a film from “the female gaze”, and after all, the commission from which Denis worked was to explore “foreigness”.

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 memed dance sequences in cinema (rightly so), 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).

Sunday’s screening in our PANTHEON series will feature free refreshments and a short introduction by Dr. Sarah Shamash, media artist and educator, Emily Carr University of Art + Design.