Beau Travail

Every so often a movie comes out that conflicts me, and these are the movies that take me quite a while to analyze. Sometimes it will take a second view to see if I missed some vital element, or it will dawn on me later, and thus I will have grasped what it was that at the moment seemed rather inconsequential. BEAU TRAVAIL, Claire Denis' 1999 film, is one of these movies. It is an adaptation of Herman Melville's "Billy Budd" -- although adaptation should be expressed in a loose term. It tells the story of an army troop stationed at Djibouti, training endlessly under the firm hand of a nearly expressionless Denis Lavant, himself a training machine, and the arrival of a young soldier played by the very beautiful Gregoire Colin who becomes the catalyst that triggers a response from Lavant. Colin, as Sentain, is the young rookie everyone loves and admires; he has great beauty and is the epitome of masculinity. This ticks Lavant's Galoup to approach Sentain at an oblique angle, and a scene in which both men face off resembles that of two lions about to attack and is a sequence of immense beauty because you see the hardened expression on Lavant's leonine face pitted against Colin's frightened yet set facade. This is what cinema is supposed to do: tell a story without too much dialogue, maybe a voice-over here or there as BEAU TRAVAIL does, and then get to its denouement, which in this movie is made more ironic than tragic. Where it falters a little is in its portentous score with a male chorus which is lifted from the opera version: it's too intrusive and is reminiscent of the score used for 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but there it had a purpose; here, I didn't see it. Frequent incursions into dance music also distract a little from the meat of the story. What I do admire is Denis' approach to the material. In bringing a strong homoerotic element to the scene, she also manages to do what few gay directors have done: create a visually mesmerizing work of art where male passion is expressed through what is appropriate of the gender: physical activity. It's what I've always wanted to see: an aggressive ballet of masculine energy which unfolds a deceptively simple story of attraction, repulsion, and envy. Highly recommended.

The film's message about the goodness and innocence of Setain, and the malice of Sargeant Galoup, is too subtle for the film's own good, and comes across as being undeveloped. Why doesn't Galoup more deeply question his hatred for Setain? I was a bit dismayed that this wasn't questioned much, even if there weren't any answers. Also, the film's marketing makes the film sound lurid and sexual, whereas it is not. Perhaps to draw in more viewers for an otherwise dry and sparse depiction of man's senselessness. The film initially shows a lot of promise. The interaction among the men is more comradeship than anything else. I was interested in the depiction of Legionnaire military life, especially from the various other countries.

The medium of film is blessed with the fact that with it, it is possible to exploit the merits of almost every artform. Film can make use of still imagery, like painting and photography, and three-dimensional (albeit in a virtual sense) imagery, like sculpture. It is music with visuals - theatre without physical restrictions. Hence, the possibilities of film are more numerous than any one other artform. However, the medium's potential remains largely unexplored, as very few film-makers venture far past conventional dialogue-based storytelling. As a means of story-telling, film is inferior to literature. The book, after all, is almost always better than the film. Dialogue-based storytelling is simply not the medium's forté. Claire Denis, with Beau Travail, has reminded us of this by making a beautiful , and powerful, film which is told largely through imagery. The subject of Beau Travail is very masculine: Men in the foreign legion - and in particular, one man's bitter obsession with another when he feels his 'alpha male' status threatened. The manner in which the film is made, however, is very feminine. Instead of a logical, cause-and-effect structure, the film has an ethereal fluidity. It is less made up of scenes, than it is of dozens of segments - most of them devoid of a narrative - which flow in and out past each other, sometimes reappearing later on, sometimes not. In one such segment, the tense relationship between Galoup and Sentain is shown as the two, eyes fixed, circle each other as if in some sort of surreal, hate-driven ritual. This moment, while being far removed from real human behaviour is, through its striking symbolism, as telling of the characters' inner experiences as any dialogue between them could be. Denis focuses on the details of the mens' lives in long, fascinated shots, observing almost every element of their lives - how they exercise, rest, fight, dance, swim, iron, eat, and hate. She sees the beauty of both the men and the world they inhabit, and shows this beauty as an integral (if not THE integral) part of the film. These many studied observations are small elements that, together, make up a remarkably rich whole. They form a film which has a depth and subtlety of perception which most male directors could not, in my opinion, achieve. Written by Dawid Bleja

I did like the pseudo ballet dance in it and the disco dance at the end but more to laugh at. I also liked the french version of trailer trash ironing. Was this supposed to be some kind of lesson about men? One that 75 billion people already figured out 5000 years ago? If you are gay or closeted and have some military masochistic fantasy then by all means, well, still don't watch it because it's boring. The story is way below average and the acting is non existent. And it's all down hill from there.

Not much happens in this movie,yet I felt compelled to watch the whole thing. There is a real atmosphere to it, nice photography, great music and great silences. I wish there was a story and that could have been a great movie.

BEAU TRAVAIL is a curious film. It is based on the story 'Billy Budd' by Herman Melville and on the operatic adaptation by EM Forster of Benjamin Britten's magnificent BILLY BUDD and has all the right pieces in place to make a fine, updated adaptation of the story. Unfortunately the script fails to find the message of the story and so there is much correct atmosphere but little character development. The original story revolves around a warship (The Rights o' Man) in the French and English war that takes on recruits while at sea. The Captain relates the story of how he was forced to hang the magnificently beautiful and loved new recruit Billy Budd because of an accidental death in part due to Budd's fatal flaw - his stammer. The Master at Arms notices Billy from the beginning as a creature of physical beauty and there is a strong physical attraction to the lad. Unable to cope with his feelings, the Master at Arms plots for the downfall of the object of his desire and lust and it is his manipulation that results in Billy's hanging, nearly causing a mutiny by Billy's shipmates. Billy is a Parsifal character - a 'guileless fool', who even in his sentencing to death still blesses the Captain of the ship. All well and good. The film here transplants much of this tale to a Foreign Legion outpost in Africa, and much of the above is insinuated. The appropriation is so complete that portions of Britten's opera BILLY BUDD are used to set scenes. But there the magic stops. The 'master at arms' does not seem to desire the beautiful recruit but for some unexplained reason seeks to have him gone. Such a shame. It is as though the writer wanted to avoid homosexual overtones of the original and as a result the characters have no where to go. All of the actors are good, the scenery is bleak (a desert here instead of the bleak sea of the original)and appropriate, the music is an eclectic mix that works. All the ingredients are here to make a fine film, but it just doesn't come off. The director needed to see the old film version of Billy Budd starring Terrence Stamp to see that pitting the evil, sadistic, lusty master at arms against the virile, sensitive and good young man can and does work well.

An American director might have stretched the plot of this movie into a 10 minute short...but it still would bore you to tears. The cinematography IS wonderful, some of the shots are gorgeous and they convey a lot about the area and the mood. But 90 minutes of pretty pictures with no other redeeming factors...if you MUST watch it, turn on subtitles and watch the DVD at double speed. You'll only be bored for half the time!

As a 10 year veteran of the Marines during peace time, I loved how this movie captured the often times dull, daily routine of military life. The scenes of the legionaires meticulously ironing their uniforms, training, exercising, were very accurate and brought back a lot of memories. To some, these scenes may seem boring and belabored but I found them mesmerizing and wishing they would last longer. I also feel she somewhat captured the sometimes complicated feelings of love, hate, respect, jealousy, etc. of men living together in a military environment. Robert Ryan did a better job at being hateful in the movie "Billy Budd" than Lavant does here as Galoup. I saw him as more a tragic figure and ended up feeling sorry for him. Sorry because he ruined a life that he loved. The movie was visually beautiful. I was somewhat confused, if not fascinated, by the dance scene at the end. What does that signify?

Abstract film, told by contrasts, stylized swathes of life, Claires Denis stumbles upon little that is new here, but something here intrigues me a lot, most of it in the first half. The rites, rituals and ceremonial pomp by which army units in the line of fire choose to mythologize and invoke a story of heroic braggadoccio, which Claires Denis approaches with a curious air of the solemn and the mocking, I only briefly experienced in my short time with an infantry regime. I served most of my army time in the Technician Corps, the inglorious greasemonkeys, repairing tanks or slacking. But the tedium of army life is our shared legacy with the Foreign Legion or the Special Ops. Denis subverts this, in mocking feminism reducing that tedium to the meticulous ironing and creasing of uniforms and laundry. The savage beast is thus shown to be domesticated, fussing over a crease. It's been a man's cinema this first century, so perhaps we should get accustomed to the scorn and irony of female directors getting back at us. Nevertheless she makes a cutting remark, that fastidiousness (a matter of order and appearances) is accomplished with these creases. Inside the discotheque, where the strobe lights and Arab pop beats are equally kitsch and otherworldly, the woman is mysterious and alluring, exudes promises of sexual danger. In this game of seduction, the Legionnaires are rapacious, overly eager boys, crossing and recrossing before the seductive female gaze and smile. This first part for me is two images. The flickering shot of an Arab girl's face, gleaming with strobing colorful lights, and the shot of Legionnaires etched in silhouette in an empty street by night. Here lies the brilliance of Denis though. We know the emerging story of a cruel superior taking an unfathomable dislike to the innocent footsoldier from Billy Bud, Herman Melville's short story, and how that innocence of face invites a hatred that seethes deeper, but Denis reworks this entirely in terms of cinema. Looking at the sergeant's face we can read the portents of evil to come, but she further paints it with pictures. Ideals don't matter here, so Denis aptly carries her tragedy out to a sunbaked rocky desert. Perhaps she understood what she was doing as an opera, but in those scenes where we see men flexing their muscles or performing curious rituals out in the open air, the bombast of music and image verges on camp. I don't know much about camp though, so this doesn't concern me overmuch. She also gives us a tracking shot and a wistful tune in the soundtrack, which I find both to be beneath the filmmaking she exhibits in the rest of the film. Elsewhere she gives us images of colonial guilt, a popular subject of the European intellectual, where for example a process of Legionnaires carry a black man, then they switch and he carries a white man on his shoulders. The Djibouti natives of that desert mostly observe this ritual of male aggression with indifference though, curiosity or compassion. A lot of what the film does is only fair, and although thematically it leaves me unfulfilled, the apogee for me is the lasting impression. Of which Beau Travail leaves a strong one.

Introspective and subtle, Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL offers a modern retelling of Herman Melville's BILLY BUDD, transposing the tale of an officer who self-destructs through his jealousy of a new recruit to an outpost of the French Foreign Legion. And although the film is elegant in both its simplicity and purity, I myself found it a shade too simple and pure to be completely effective. Still, BEAU TRAVAIL has two things going for it: director Denis' cinematic eye and superior performances throughout. One truly senses the location in all its elemental nature, and the cinematography is remarkable for its restrained elegance. The cast follows suit, with direct and underplayed performances that fold seamlessly into both Denis' atmosphere and the story itself, and the result is often quite stylish. But for all its elegance and style, I found BEAU TRAVAIL too introspective and subtle for its own good; to me it lacks any significant substance, with both story and characters slipping through my attention as easily as sand slips through my hand. While this is doubtlessly part of director Denis' intent, and while I have admired many a film with a notably elusive touch, my ultimate reaction to BEAU TRAVAIL is that it is a rather superficial exercise in style over substance, and I cannot say that it leads me to interest in the director's other work. In passing, I also note that BEAU TRAVAIL is often marketed as a film with homoerotic context and imagery, but I personally did not find it so. Final word: worth a look, but not greatly memorable for all that. Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer