Beau Travail

By: Amos Lassen

"BEAU TRAVAIL"
The Price of Masculinity
Amos Lassen
Loosely inspired by Herman Melville's novella "Billy Budd" and a pair of the author's poems ("The Night March" and "Gold In The Mountain"), Claire Denis' beautiful "Beau Travail" ("good work") is an elusive film of suggestion. The central conflict between a handsome young sailor and his sinister superior is set at an outpost of French Legionnaires on the small East African nation of Djibouti. Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) is a brooding taskmaster who has no cause for antagonizing new recruit Grégoire Colin (Gilles Sentain) but is determined to destroy him anyway. Though all evidence points to the contrary, Lavant seems to believe that Colin's "thin and distant" presence will upset the honed muscular mechanics that keep his unit intact. Denis spends a lot of time on military drills and is fascinated by the masculine rituals of the soldiers' daily lives. The training sequences in "Beau Travail" and have a sensual impact and though the vague, inscrutable tension between Lavant and Colin is fascinating, Denis mostly relies on moods and impressions to keep the film moving, an enormous risk that pays off strictly based due to her mastery of sight and sound.
The oppressive neocolonialist Sergeant Galoup becomes jealous when Sentain saves the life of a fellow soldier after a horrifying helicopter accident. Galoup's jealousy challenges the man's notions of brotherhood. Denis and cinematographer Agnes Godard raise Sentain and Galoup's relationship to sweaty and existential levels. When the half-naked men begin to circle each other on a desolate beach, they resemble animals locked in a battle for survival and the film becomes experimental dance art. Denis contemplates a sweltering struggle between man's instinctual and conditioned self. The film's men are constantly in training, struggling to maintain a mechanism of stability by working (and working out) together. The oppressed African women who live outside the outpost stare into the camp, are amused by the way the men learn and struggle to play house. Denis is sympathetic of Galoup's insecurities even when the man's jealousy of Sentain leads to chaos. She understands that Galoup was once like Sentain: a young man taught to react like a machine to anything and anyone who threatens his sense of complacency. Galoup is merely a rotten byproduct of a dehumanizing military apparatus, but by film's end he finally learns to let go a bit.
The originality of Claire Denis' cinematic approach is definitive. There is so much going on beneath the surface, what you see on screen is camouflage.
Galoup looks like a man who with suffering. He wanders the rain-washed streets of Marseilles, like a visitor from an alien planet. He was a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion and "Beau Travail" is the story of why he left. It is also a study in masculinity, self-control and the ritualistic nature of army discipline.
Repressed emotion thrives in this bleak, inhospitable outpost and yet remains unspoken, unresolved. The commander (Michel Subor) barely oversees the pointless exercises of these fit young men, as if to question why they do would be treason.
Galoup's admiration for his superior officer connects with the loyalty he feels towards the Legionnaires' code. Only the arrival of Sentain as a new recruit, unsettles the balance. Perhaps Sentain's essential decency subverts a numbed acceptance of institutional bullying, causing disquiet amongst the ranks.
Denis allows the camera to fondle the landscape and the drama lies deep below the surface of words. Galoup says later in Marseilles, "I stayed away from France too long. I am unfit for civil life." What he means, and what the film demonstrates with its bare imagery, is that the Legion's colonial history has no place in the modern world. It exists in isolation, still harsh and unforgiving, but no longer relevant. We see this in the commander's face. Galoup's obsession with Sentain destroys and frees him but that freedom stains the memory of what was.