BEAU TRAVAIL

BEAU TRAVAIL IS one of the most beautiful films ever made about discipline, masculinity and jealousy. Claire Denis takes the outline of Herbert Melville’s critically-acclaimed but unfinished novella "Billy Budd" and moves it to Djibouti, where Denis Lavant’s Sergeant Galoup looks back on his time in the French Foreign Legion and on the arrival of a younger recruit whose presence starts to unsettle the whole order of his world. 

The plot isn’t really the thing that drives this film. What matters more to Denis is mood, gesture, ritual, bodies in sunlight, movement drilled into routine until it starts to feel erotic, competitive and unstable. The real force of the film lies in the way Denis tells the Galoup's story through sensation rather than exposition.

What I love about BEAU TRAVAIL is how much it trusts the image. Denis doesn’t overstate anything. She lets meaning accumulate through rhythm, the monotonous repetition of life in the legion, and the physical life of the men on screen. In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll, it placed number 7 on the greatest films of all time list, and the BFI has written about it as a rapturous exploration of male identity in crisis. That standing makes a lot of sense to me. This is a film that feels severe and sensual at once, such as the iconic solo dance scene that was captured by Denis in one magical take. These images and sequences linger long after you depart the cinema.