Director: Claire Denis
"In Melville's sailor stories there are descriptions of sailors climbing up and down the rigging and it's like dance. And I found that to translate what Melville was writing about dance worked better than dialogue." Claire Denis in Sight and Sound July 2000
Claire Denis’ new film, Beau Travail is a poetically austere work of beauty that emphasizes place over character and mood over plot. It is less a soldier’s story than a vibrantly choreographed meditation on a group of soldiers in the present day French Foreign Legion in Northern Africa. The images, which consist of a group of soldiers training in a flat and a wind swept rocky East African locale, are purely poetic.
The rugged environment could be another world and at times it’s as if the soldiers are stuck on another planet awaiting their fate. The fate of the soldiers, it turns out, is at the whim of their slightly mad Sergeant named Galoup -- played by the reptilian looking acrobat actor Denis Levant -- who tells the story in flashback. The film is loosely based in Herman Melville’s book "Billy Budd", which is about an innocent soldier who is killed. The story that Galoup tells slowly develops as a flashback and recalls the way that he planned the demise of a soldier (Gregoire Colin) he believes is out to get him. Unlike the book the film deals with the subjective P.O.V. of the bad guy and the structure is made up of the memories of his actions, his guilt and his redemption.
Claire Denis makes films that loosely append themselves to a plot and can seem confusing since they don’t follow a traditional narrative structure. With her fabulous debut Chocolat and her other recent features including Nanette & Boni Denis’ casually poetic documentary style seems to take precedent over everything else. At first her films don’t seem to be about anything except observations until incidents occur that relate to one another and then eventually tie together as the film goes on. Her gift is that she doesn’t tell you how to think about a scene but makes you think about what you’re looking at.
More theme based than plot driven, Denis’ films not only set out to place characters in a mental frame of mind as well as a physical landscape but to let the audience experience the same type of alienation as the characters. Sometimes this effect is achieved simply through the use of multiple languages.
Many of Denis’ films concern immigrants in France or are set in Africa -- as is Beau Travail-- and the language barrier is an important component of the milieu and Beau Travail has about half a dozen languages.
In many ways Beau Travail can be seen as a cinematic military ballet with choreographed sequences of soldiers doing daily exercises. At the start of the day the men stand poised with arms stretched out from their bodies rocking slowly as if they are blades of grass blowing in the wind. Then they carry on with their daily rigmarole, which consists of digging holes, painting rocks, doing exercise drills and many other menial chores.
Their exercises are all set to music and include marching on land, flying through air over barriers and swimming under water. Often the music is a Legionnaire tune, which comes in with a low rumble – a tune that may make some viewers expect to see Lawrence of Arabia come riding over the horizon. But Denis is much more interested in subverting that response by letting the music set a deep, slow mood which is more transcendental than heroic. Denis too seems to be commenting on the whole atavistic concept of The French Foreign Legion, French colonialism and military honor riding just below the surface.
The visual power of the cinematography -- by Agnes Godard --is expressionist in tone and made all the more striking by the strength of the editing. This is achieved in part by Denis’ cutting into a scene midway through the action as opposed to cutting from the end of one scene to the beginning of another via set-up still shot.
The one questionable technique in the film is Denis’ use of an ominous, almost sinister score that adds an element of mystery to the film when there clearly isn’t any. The choice of this type of music in this particular film is disturbing mainly because it builds tension without any kind of payoff. Since Denis' intention is to use music to such an effect it’s safe to say that on subsequent viewings the film may reveal more levels of meaning in these particular scenes. But as it is now it feels conspicuous.
Beau Travail accumulates so much tension that thankfully it ends with a much-needed blissful cathartic note that can be seen as either a cinematic form of redemption or just an aesthetically pleasing way to end a film. Denis’ own comments were that she had to end it that way she did because otherwise it would be a serious downer.
The fact that Beau Travail may recall the visual potency of a film like The Thin Red Line, which too lacks a traditional four-act story, will automatically set people into opposing camps. I don't share the enthusiams of many of my fellow critics but I still believe it is one of the better films of the year and time will tell if it is a masterpiece.
- Matt Langdon
