Beau Travail

Claire Denis’ masterpiece of a film.

Beau travail, which marked Claire Denis’ major breakthrough, has been hailed as one of the most original and beautiful films of the 1990s – a film that remains something of a mystery. This is because it is both open and concrete at the same time, inviting repeated viewings.

Perhaps most striking is how such a sparse, abstract film about desire and restraint among a group of French Foreign Legion soldiers in Djibouti has elicited such rapturous responses. Unlike Denis’ earlier, more realistic and autobiographical films, Beau travail draws on literary, musical, and cinematic references. At its core lies Herman Melville’s homoerotic novella Billy Budd, Benjamin Britten’s opera based on the same story, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat. (Critics have also noted echoes of both Jean Genet and Taxi Driver.) Still, the film shares much with Denis’ earlier work: in setting (Africa), in theme (male friendship, sexuality, loneliness, forbidden desire, colonialism, the tension between France and Africa, Black and white, men and women), in its use of music (here Britten and techno by Corona), and in its subjective narrative style.

Beau travail takes the love triangle from «Billy Budd», centered on sexual jealousy, but largely discards the allegory of good and evil. Denis is less concerned with plot than with poetic beauty – the shapes, colors, and textures of the landscape, the sea, and the human body in natural light; with the rituals and gestures of men in isolation; and with the psychology of repression. The result is a gorgeous and enigmatic film, pulsating in rhythm with the grandeur of Britten’s opera and the hypnotic, visually arresting – at times dizzyingly beautiful – choreography of bodies in motion.

This film is part of