Beau travail

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" 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."

Abstract film, told by contrasts, stylized swathes of life, Claires Denis stumbles upon little that is new here, but something here intrigues me a lot, most of it in the first half.

The rites, rituals and ceremonial pomp by which army units in the line of fire choose to mythologize and invoke a story of heroic braggadoccio, which Claires Denis approaches with a curious air of the solemn and the mocking, I only briefly experienced in my short time with an infantry regime. I served most of my army time in the Technician Corps, the inglorious greasemonkeys, repairing tanks or slacking. But the tedium of army life is our shared legacy with the Foreign Legion or the Special Ops.

Denis subverts this, in mocking feminism reducing that tedium to the meticulous ironing and creasing of uniforms and laundry. The savage beast is thus shown to be domesticated, fussing over a crease. It's been a man's cinema this first century, so perhaps we should get accustomed to the scorn and irony of female directors getting back at us. Nevertheless she makes a cutting remark, that fastidiousness (a matter of order and appearances) is accomplished with these creases.

Inside the discotheque, where the strobe lights and Arab pop beats are equally kitsch and otherworldly, the woman is mysterious and alluring, exudes promises of sexual danger. In this game of seduction, the Legionnaires are rapacious, overly eager boys, crossing and recrossing before the seductive female gaze and smile. This first part for me is two images. The flickering shot of an Arab girl's face, gleaming with strobing colorful lights, and the shot of Legionnaires etched in silhouette in an empty street by night.

Here lies the brilliance of Denis though. We know the emerging story of a cruel superior taking an unfathomable dislike to the innocent footsoldier from Billy Bud, Herman Melville's short story, and how that innocence of face invites a hatred that seethes deeper, but Denis reworks this entirely in terms of cinema. Looking at the sergeant's face we can read the portents of evil to come, but she further paints it with pictures.

Ideals don't matter here, so Denis aptly carries her tragedy out to a sunbaked rocky desert. Perhaps she understood what she was doing as an opera, but in those scenes where we see men flexing their muscles or performing curious rituals out in the open air, the bombast of music and image verges on camp. I don't know much about camp though, so this doesn't concern me overmuch. She also gives us a tracking shot and a wistful tune in the soundtrack, which I find both to be beneath the filmmaking she exhibits in the rest of the film.

Elsewhere she gives us images of colonial guilt, a popular subject of the European intellectual, where for example a process of Legionnaires carry a black man, then they switch and he carries a white man on his shoulders. The Djibouti natives of that desert mostly observe this ritual of male aggression with indifference though, curiosity or compassion.

A lot of what the film does is only fair, and although thematically it leaves me unfulfilled, the apogee for me is the lasting impression. Of which Beau Travail leaves a strong one.

As a 10 year veteran of the Marines during peace time, I loved how this movie captured the often times dull, daily routine of military life. The scenes of the legionaires meticulously ironing their uniforms, training, exercising, were very accurate and brought back a lot of memories. To some, these scenes may seem boring and belabored but I found them mesmerizing and wishing they would last longer. I also feel she somewhat captured the sometimes complicated feelings of love, hate, respect, jealousy, etc. of men living together in a military environment. Robert Ryan did a better job at being hateful in the movie "Billy Budd" than Lavant does here as Galoup. I saw him as more a tragic figure and ended up feeling sorry for him. Sorry because he ruined a life that he loved. The movie was visually beautiful. I was somewhat confused, if not fascinated, by the dance scene at the end. What does that signify?

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!