Beau Travail (2002)

Now I did it. My overblown ratings of other films by other directors make it impossible to properly rank the films of Claire Denis on any kind of rational scale. I've given Hollywood films a "ten" rating. By that standard, Denis makes films where the ratings should range from twelve to twenty. I'll give "Beau Travail" a rating of 18 (not twenty--I don't want to make the same mistake again and paint myself into another corner).It is simply not possible to explain how this genius has transformed my view of cinema. There is no pretense here. I am amazed at nearly every scene in a kind of collage of images and sounds. Denis takes the "military life" and turns it on its own homophobic head and produces the work of art. Viola! It's so far outside of our daily experience that it mirrors, not daily life, but that daily mental circus we call our minds. Claire Denis is like a U.S. major league pitcher throwing heat. You can either hit major league pitching or you can't. You either get this "type" of film or you don't.(But with time and maturity I think that anyone can come to understand this greatest of this generation's filmmakers. So don't despair if you are twenty-something horrified at what appears to be pretentious nonsense. Wait a while. With time comes understanding.) The characters in "Beau Travail" are in the French Foreign Legion but they are also representative of all soldiers. They are intensely motivated by hormonal secretions and cultural institutions. They are thrown into the winds of internal fires and drowned out by external tsunamis. They are young and dumb and believe they are immortal, and by golly, they seem to be just that. The conflicts that arise often seem petty and putrid when viewed from without, but from within these same conflicts fairly glow with the heat of pride and glory. No "psychological" analysis can reveal the essence of such conflict. No "homoerotic" projections can drain the sap from this tree of life.To be a soldier is transcendent. To be a failure as a soldier is to be thrown back into the ordinary world, and in some ways to fail at existence itself. It's not about "morality" but it is about truth and courage and honor and the real essence of what motivates us all. Dreams, not reality, are what we will remember when we cross over into the afterlife. Here, at the end of ordinary thought, we begin our journey into the mind of one individual and the daily, moment-by-moment living of life that he is loath to do. Man confronted by the pale and washed-out image, that is supposed to the here and now, but is only the after-image of life.I viewed this film without subtitles in the French language and I don't speak much French. It's not a movie about "blah blah." Let your third eye drink it in. Stop filtering what you hear and see. Free your mind.

This film is extremely artsy, though it is not a boring film: plenty of stuff keeps happening so that you are constantly being entertained by it. It is a rather modern art-house film in that it is edited so that it flows at a much faster pace than, let's say, Bergman's films. So it is more watchable for someone who is not that into artsy films, such as me.It has a very strong ending as well. Dramatic without being melodramatic. The film also has a plot that is rather hidden and I needed to think a little about it before I understood it. There is also the fact that this film has very strong homoerotic undertones and women and gay men will like that.

I was very happy with this movie. The languid pace of the editing serves the remembrances of a jealous and obsessive commanding officer, as he recounts his dealings with a young legionnaire. Claire Denis skillfully allows static shots to evolve into moving shots and still figures to resemble the dynamism of Grecian statues. Many times, while watching the legionnaires perform their arduous training drills, I was reminded of classical statues. I also noticed how there was a vague homo-erotic underpinning to the legionnaire lifestyle, never outwardly expressed. Galoup, the officer who remembers the story for the viewer, only has access to certain aspects of the events portrayed. This leaves the viewer to do much of the work in figuring out what has happened. In the end, the narrative splits and we have a vision of Sentain, the young legionnaire, suffering in exile. I found this split necessary and welcome though, as it perhaps constitutes a dream or fantasy being experienced by Galoup. Galoup's obsession with Sentain allows him to construct his own version of what happens to the younger man when he left the legion. I was also sometimes reminded of '300', though only inasmuch as they are both movies that show a certain respect and love for the male form. However, in '300' the male form becomes a device of basic warfare or basic sexual desire. In 'Beau Travail,' the male form is much more utilitarian, perhaps even universal. Effort went in to showing the monotony and conformity of the chores and drills; the things that cause all of the men to look, act and think the same, and the overall effect that militarization might have on the psyche of the individual. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who hasn't seen it.

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.