Beau travail

Going against the trend of reviews here, as is usual for me, I loved this film. Perhaps only another outsider can see how brilliantly Lavant acts the outsider. He is a jealous outsider, jealous of Sentain. He is jealous of him, not in love with him and there is a difference. Galoup (Lavant) truly loves Forestier, but as Galoup points out, Forestier doesn't care. Instead, when Sentain appears, Forestier is attracted to him in a way he was not to Galoup. Well, Sentain is charming, calm, open, attractive, all the things Galoup is not. Sentain is one of the gang, Galoup is an outsider and no matter how hard he tries, he cannot get in. Much of the film is dialogue free, but Lavant admirably shows what he is feeling with his facial and body gestures. And after all that falls out from this jealous rage, Galoup is returned to France but still remains an outsider. No friends in the Legion, nor out of it. And the finale, Galoup dancing by himself in a very contorted way, is one of the most agonizing I have seen. It represents well what Galoup's life is like. You should not see this film if you are looking for a homoerotic experience. It is not about sexuality, but the rage of an outsider. As such, it is brilliant.

Like all Claire Denis films, 'Beau Travail' demands constant vigilance and flexibility, never exactly forswearing narrative - there IS a plot here - but concentrating less on its mechanics than on the bits in between, the everyday rituals normally excised from the screen, a precise meditation on the landscape in which it is set, a rhythmic treatment of the titled beau travail, all seemingly irrelevant to the narrative, but making it inevitable, a linear narrative in a world of endless, pointless circles.

Like 'Once Upon A Time In America', 'Travail' opens with a sequence of seemingly random, unconnected sequences eventually bound together in an overpowering organising consciousness. A shot of a silhouetted mural of soldiers marching over craggy rocks, which look like waves, an appropriately Melvillean image, with Foreign Legion chants blared over them. The highly stylised rendering of a nightclub, which seems tiny, austere, minimally decorated, with lighting reflecting the rhythm of the music, and the soldiers between the local African women, their movements notably stilted, ritualised. The officer seated alone. The vast African landscape, a coastal desert, with abandoned phallic tanks, site of a military exercise, a group of topless men in rigid poses against the immemorial sand and sea, classical heroes. An unseen hand writing. A train travelling through the landscape as we follow someone's view out the window. The same point of view after the train has moved.

These images do have an independent function. They begin a pattern of dualities that are continued and complicated throughout the film leading to the eventual climax, always inscrutably observed by a third strand, Forestier, former informer turned commandant - water/desert; soldiers/locals; men/women; landscape/human; indoors/outdoors; play/work etc. But this is an army, and these disparate elements must be controlled, as they are, by Galoup, the sergeant. As the film opens, he embodies civilisation - he writes while others cannot communicate; he is the subject who sees, interprets, explains, while everyone else is an object in his narrative; he wears clothes while his soldiers go round naked; he is an all-seeing God who can decide men's fate, while these men are unthinking robots, sleepwalking through time-honoured rites.

The irony is that, because of all this, Galoup, the defender of discipline and convention, is the film's real outsider, not the mysterious Russian he seeks to expel, a man who learns another language to fit in, who quickly becomes one of the boys, who will defend his friends at the risk of his own death.

Is this why Galoup abhors him, his humanity in this mechanistic unit of marital discipline? Unlikely; Galoup is the only 'human' character in the film, it's difficult to tell individual soldiers, even Sentain. After all, that 's what the Foreign Legion, in popular terms anyway, is all about: a refuge for the hunted, somewhere to hide your identity and past, become part of an anonymous mass.

For me, though, there is something missing. For all the cool gazing on the masculine body, the absorbed interest in these very physical rituals, in the feminising of their military discipline (eg ironing; repeating the same tasks day in, day out, like housewives); there is a lack of the homoerotic charge lurching through Melville and Britten. The gaze of the camera is, of course, Galoup's, the narrative a visualising of what he writes; and when he lies on the bed with his gun near the end, we can't tell whether the gesture will be onanistic or suicidal. The rushed, hallucinatory climax, full of Leonesque stand-offs and ellipses, are framed by a shot of Galoup asleep, and a blazing white light when he awakes, as if he, like Noodles, has dreamed the whole thing, has sublimated his homosexuality into a murderous (but consummated) narrative, reduced vast geographical terrain (including three volcanoes whose explosive potential mirrors his own suppressed desire) to a narrow site for a private rite, a self-reflecting dance in an empty nightclub.

And how cool is it that the real president of Djibouti is called Ismael!

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.

Beau Travail ("Good Work") is loosely based on Herman Melville's classic novella Billy Budd. Billy Budd was a tragedy brought about partly by the strictures of military discipline, but was really a story of masculinity and power; a powerful psychological study of three characters and personalities unable to coexist without damaging or destroying each other.

French director Claire Denis transfers the story from the eighteenth century British navy to a unit of the French Foreign Legion in an African outpost. The exotic backdrop of the Foreign legion - with its all-male bonding and strict discipline - is inspired. Having the film narrated by Galoup, the film's Claggart character, is not. Claggart was fascinating to Melville because he could discern no real reason for his hatred of Budd; it was ascribed to his nature and essentially unfathomable. Denis and the actor playing Galoup (Denis Lavant) seem to lack insight into his motives as well, so he's a poor choice to carry the story. Equally frustrating is Denis' lack of focus on Sentain (Gregoire Colin), the charismatic Budd who's supposed to drive the action. Instead, there's a lot of empty posing in the desert. The climax - the first real incident in an overlong film - is over too quickly to be satisfying.

"Beau Travail" uniquely provides a woman's eye, director/co-writer Claire Denis, on the movie genre of taut men in groups, peace time military subset, with much less profanity or crudeness or misogyny than is typical.

The camera loves looking at all these half naked, trim, fit young men, as they are seen over and over in all kinds of repetitive physical exertions, from the usual military obstacle courses to martial arts exercises that look like tai chi, to ones that seem like yoga and then banging against each other. (Surely these images must have influenced the later directors of "Tigerland" and "Jarhead.") It is amusing to see them busily ironing clothes in order to get the required creases in their uniforms. I haven't seen such a sensual scene of men ironing since Kevin Costner in "Bull Durham."

The narrating sergeant "Galoup" is the usual strict bully, punishingly competitive in all these exercises. But I completely missed that the film was an adaptation of "Billy Budd" until I saw the closing credits that referenced the Britten opera on the soundtrack because the object of his attention, "Sentain," doesn't seem like a helpless victim.

Unlike all movies about the duress of basic training and keeping enlisted men in line, the story is not from the point of view of this victim, but is told as a flashback by the sergeant with lots of references to what is lost and found (we hear "perdu" and "trouve" a lot though some is lost in translation as idioms are poorly translated in the subtitles, such as of sang froid).

The sergeant seems out of "The Bridge Over the River Kwai" school, setting the under-employed Foreign Legionnaires posted on the coast of Djibouti to work repairing deserted roads and literally digging holes in the desert to work out his frustrations.

The orphan just gets under his burr until he intentionally provokes him to the limit. It is certainly not clear what it is about him that annoys the sergeant. His lean beauty? His casual heroism? Even if there's some conflicted homosexual urges, and the sensuality of the local African environment and music are continually emphasized, amidst the homo-erotic subtext, the sergeant clearly has the hots for a young local woman.

We don't get to learn much about the individual Legionnaires. The commandant, the crusty Michel Subor, is comfortable as a career soldier and, surprisingly in this genre, does support a sense of fair play and justice, as symbolized by his chess playing. He keeps insisting the men are no longer Russian or African but now are loyal to the Legion (as we keep hearing the anthem over and over). There is some grudging tolerance of the exoticism of diversity, even as the Muslims are teased during Ramadan.

Even as viewed on video tape, the setting and contrasts in Africa are beautiful – from the desert to the sparkling bright ocean, but the narration is annoying, even as it ties together the memories of regret.

The music is very evocative of the setting. The curving sensuality of night time African dance clubs and the women dancing is contrasted with the formality of the men's exercising. So I think in the conclusion the sergeant is finally trying to integrate all his experiences to the tune of "Spirit of the Night."