BEAU TRAVAIL A
France (93 mi) 1999 d: Claire Denis
With banners furled, and clarions mute,
France (93 mi) 1999 d: Claire Denis
With banners furled, and clarions mute,
An army passes in the
night,
And beaming spears and
helms salute,
The dark with bright.
In silence deep the
legions stream,
With open ranks, in
order true;
Over boundless plains
they stream and gleam–
No chief in view!
Afar, in twinkling
distance lost,
(So legends tell) he lonely wends
And back through all that shining host
His mandate sends.
(So legends tell) he lonely wends
And back through all that shining host
His mandate sends.
—The Night March, Herman
Melville from Timoleon,1891
Gold in the mountain
And gold in the glen
And greed in the heart
Heaven having no part
And unsatisfied men.
—Gold in the Mountain,
Herman Melville from The Works of Herman
Melville, 1924
This film grew out of a French TV commission when Denis was
approached by ARTE, the most culturally progressive European TV channel, and
asked to make a film for a series exploring the theme of “foreignness.” This is the same company that earlier asked
Denis and others, namely Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, COLD WATER (1994), and
André Téchiné, WILD REEDS (1994), to make films about adolescence, which
resulted in the one-hour made-for-French-TV film U.S. GO HOME (1994). “Since most of my films deal with that
anyway, I worried about how I could avoid repeating myself.” Having spent her early childhood in colonial
French Africa, then moving to the Paris suburbs at age 13, she never felt like
she belonged in either place, growing up feeling alienated. Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, though altering the themes
and ultimately the outcome, including carefully chosen excerpts of music from
the Benjamin Britten opera, Denis has transposed the ship’s setting to a
postcolonial French Foreign Legion outpost in the desert regions of Djibouti,
Somalia, one of the places her family lived in the 50’s, so she already had a
familiarity with the region. Shot in
just 15 days, what’s so remarkable about the film is the extreme originality,
the indirect way of telling the story, reflecting the bad conscience of the
colonial occupying power, as almost immediately one detects a solidly abstract
visual expressionism, where the near wordless film becomes an intoxicating
choreography of ritualized movement, as the group of fifteen muscular men do shirtless
calisthenics in formation under the emptiness of the blistering desert sky, drenched
with male eroticism and cast in the form of a languorous tropical dream, where
a theme of rootless and abandoned men who otherwise have no home adapt to the
rigid discipline of the legion. Perhaps
more importantly, Denis hired a choreographer, Bernardo Montet (who also plays
one of the French legionnaires), transforming the film into a series of
carefully constructed scenes, providing a near surreal structure, intentionally
blurring the lines between illusion and reality.
A taut psychological exploration of the increasingly
antagonistic relationship between a Foreign Legion officer, Lieutenant Galoup
(Denis Lavant), and a charismatic new recruit, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin),
Galoup narrates the tale in voiceover, where he is fanatically loyal to his
commanding officer Bruno Forestier, Michel Subor, who previously played Bruno
Forestier 37 years earlier in Godard's LE PETIT SOLDAT (1963) which was set
during the Algerian War, actually banned for three years in
France prior to the release due to the presence of torture scenes, where Forestier
is now much older, seen with a chiseled face, sitting alone from the rest of
the men, constantly smoking cigarettes. The
Denis film offers a revisionist perspective by actually engaging in a
conversation with that earlier film through a shared character. But when new recruits arrive, Galoup expresses
extraordinary vehemence towards the especially attractive Sentain, especially
after Forestier has taken an immediate liking to him, overly insecure and
threated perhaps by his own noticeable lack of good looks. Galoup's jealousy, like Othello, literally drives him to murderous insanity. With a minimum of dialogue, Denis captures
the ritual and repetition of a legionnaire’s life, expressed through beautifully
ordered compositions of the men during various maneuvers, crawling under barbed
wire, vaulting over bars, walking across elevated parallel wires, marching in
formation across the desolate landscape, while also engaged in hand to hand
combat. The homoeroticism of the
military experience rises to the forefront from the beauty of the visual
composition, but also from the inner workings of Galoup’s mind, as he
expresses his love of Forestier (carrying around a photo of him as a younger
man) and a growing rage against Sentain.
While the legionnaires come from all races and hues, the film raises
questions about the relationships of whites to blacks, especially given the
perspective of a former French colony, highlighted in scenes where the men go
into town on leave and dance with the local women, where one particular local
beauty, Rahel (Marta Tafesse Kassa), seems to be the exclusive girl of Galoup, though
he treats her paternalistically, as his primary interest remains
Forestier. While the setting is Africa,
the atmospheric mood is one of reverie, spending hot dusty afternoons in the
sun, where the monotony of the experience can overwhelm the legionnaires. The voiceover is actually recalling events
from a diary in a flashback mode, offering a ruminating calm, even as Galoup’s
plans grow more inflamed, where his desire is more potent precisely because it
remains unconsummated.
Denis creates a sensuous atmosphere not only with perfectly
composed images, but the dramatic power never diminishes between major and
minor events, often contrasting close ups with long shots, blending music and
natural sound into her film, where she’s not afraid to use silences to match
the spacious emptiness all around.
What’s perhaps most surprising, despite the focus on the men, is how
carefully layered women are into the landscape, becoming a kind of Greek
chorus, where their silent presence is everywhere, amusingly seen staring at
the men as they carefully wash and iron their clothes, lining the street
markets selling their goods, or seen sitting in the buses riding through the endless
landscapes. When the legionnaires stream
into town on leave, they’re seen dancing at the local nightclub with native
women, exchanging physical embraces, but rarely words. The film opens and closes on the dance floor,
where the whole film unravels like continual dance sequences, where even in
their silence the women are an integral and necessary part of a dance ritual,
but their presence is hauntingly ambiguous, silent witnesses, suggesting a
potentially unhealthy relationship with the postcolonial presence of the soldiers,
who may not be so welcome in the region.
According to Denis, “You always have a moment in life when you’d like to
start from zero. The Foreign Legion is a
place where boys go to do that, where people who have no place to go can find a
kind of family, especially because they're not asked what they did before. The legionnaires became an erotic object in
film and song—Edith Piaf’s song ‘Mon Legionnaire’ is one of her most famous—but
when I saw them walking in the street or going to clubs, their beauty was more
sad to me than erotic. You could see
that the Legion is about men together.
These boys who never belonged before now belong to one another. It’s very touching.” Tribute to Beau Travail YouTube (8:15), featuring the opening dance
sequence with African girls in a disco to “Şimarik (Kiss-Kiss)” by Tarkan (0 to
1:24), calisthenics with a Benjamin Britten chorale (1:25 to 2:25), more
unscored calisthenics, (2:25 to 3:45), dance sequence with Rahel (Marta Tafesse
Kassa) to Francky Vincent “Le Tourment d’Amour” (3:45 to 4:30), more unscored
calisthenics (4:30 to 5:23), march in formation to Neil Young’s “Safeway Cart”
(5:23 to 6:50), Denis Lavant final dance sequence up to the end credits to
Corona “Rhythm of the Night” (6:50 to 8:15), while this extends the throbbing dance
music through the final credits, singing almost in defiance, “This is the
rhythm of my life, my life,” CD
Beau Travail YouTube (4:59).
The full force of the film took critic Jonathan Rosenbaum by
such surprise that he had to admit “I must confess that I’m embarrassed by most
of my other reviews of Claire Denis films,” claiming the difference between
this film and her earlier work “is quite simply the difference between making
movies and making cinema,” comparing it to the quantum leap taken by certain
exalted artists like Robert Johnson or Charlie Parker in blues and jazz. Some of the glorified images of male bodies
during training exercises or on maneuvers are comparable to the idealized
images of farmers harvesting the fields in Dovzhenko’s EARTH (1930),
Eisenstein’s visually astounding battle scenes in ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938), or
the glorified sweep of perfectly sculpted battle formations in Jancsó’s THE RED
AND THE WHITE (1967) or Kurosawa’s RAN (1985).
While the history of cinema is filled with beautiful young women in
various shades of undress being leered at by gawking male directors, male
bodies have come under scrutiny before as well, where the term homoerotic
suggests it was largely under the gaze of male directors, where the names Derek
Jarman or Pier Paolo Pasolini come to mind, or Todd Haynes’s Poison
(1991), or Fassbinder’s QUERELLE (1982), which has a similar doomed love theme
between a superior older officer and a gorgeous looking young sailor. What’s unique here is how rare it is to find
similar themes of male bodies visualized so artistically under a woman’s gaze,
including the director and her lifelong cinematographer Agnès Godard, where you
may have to go back to Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA (1938) for a similar
comparison, where one suspects every single German cameraman in 1938 was male. If one examines art history, women have
typically been systematically excluded from art training, and this argument is
raised every year at the Cannes Film Festival as to why there are so few female
directors represented in competition, if any.
Only the names of Agnès Varda or the more literary Marguerite Duras are
included in the French New Wave, which otherwise produced all male directors,
where women were more likely to appear in front of the camera. With alternating images of stark despair and
staggering beauty, the suggestion here is not only is it rare, but from women directors it may be
unsurpassed aesthetically.
