Claire Denis is a director I discovered only in the last decade or so. A name spoken in hushed tones in certain pretentious film circles, her best work reveals that she has more than earned her formidable reputation (and her lesser work is still worth a watch too). Her films are sometimes called impenetrable, elliptical, and obtuse, but there is always a direct logic at play throughout–with each lingering image placed exactly where it needs to be convey her point. Beau Travail is definitely not one of her more accessible films, but it is also one of her most direct and focused narratives.
Beau Travail tells the story of an officer in the French Foreign Legion who succumbs to jealously when a new recruit seems to steal away his commanding officer’s attention. It is (very) loosely based on a Herman Melville story “Billy Budd,” though according to the Wikipedia page, the film’s homoerotic subtext is not as explicit in the novella. Of course, this is the same guy who wrote that spermiciti handholding chapter into Moby Dick, so Denis correctly sussed out the direction her movie should take.
And, while this is a movie about shirtless men practicing aggressive hugging drills in the desert while eventually becoming homicidally jealous over perceived spurning, it feels like it is somehow more than just a film about gay men in the Legion. Denis does not seem concerned with viewing human relationships through any kind of spectrum of sexuality. Rather, these men are simply searching for companionship. The officer Galoup is desperate to reclaim his lost connection to his distant commanding officer Forestier, while the new recruit Sentain seems only to want to exist and find a place (for the first time in his life) in this world.
Yes, the endless shots of rippling sweaty male bodies might be the most clear-cut example of the female gaze I have yet seen committed to celluloid, and yes, the film is undoubtedly an important work of queer cinema by any reading you choose to apply to it–but that is only the surface. Like all great works of film (and this truly is one of the greatest ever made), Beau Travail‘s meaning goes far beyond simple labels.
It is a film about a man at the end of his life reflecting on his choices. The viewer might see Galoup as a man who has wasted his life drilling and making beds while remaining entranced with his commanding officer, and there is definitely a truth to that reading. But, Galoup also at times seems almost to be without regret, to have lived up to his nihilistic chest tattoo of “serve the good cause and then die.” Of course, the final breathtakingly-brilliant dance scene (dream?) suggests that this is a man who might have gone too far in his quest to serve only the good cause as a lifetime of repressed emotion bubbles to the surface for the first (and likely last) time.
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