Beau Travail (1999)
Denis’ magisterial depiction of jealousy, outsiderness, and bodies in space
Country: France
Director: Claire Denis
Time: 1 hour and 31 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription), Kanopy (free w/library card or university ID)
What It Evokes: Dance, fixation gone awry, male-dominated spaces
Only towards the end of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail do viewers gain a clear vantage of Galoup’s chest tattoo. It reads, “Serve the good cause and die.” The “good cause” referred to remains ambiguous. Galoup has recently been expelled from a French Foreign Legion regiment stationed in Djibouti and has returned home to Marseille. The legionnaires haven’t been involved in any specific mission, nor does their presence in East Africa serve an obvious purpose. Indeed, the French Foreign Legion’s “good cause” has long since lost its purchase or legitimacy. (The Legion was originally created in 1831 to formalize the French use of internationals as reinforcements in recently seized Algeria.) Like many maxims, it is by turns banal and profound—context matters. By the film’s end, Galoup himself has been thoroughly de-contextualized, exiled from the profession and role that has shaped his sense of self and purpose. Serve the good cause and die: maxim into epitaph.
Very loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor and employing to great effect Benjamin Britten’s bracing operatic treatment of the same story, Beau Travail (best translated to my mind as “Good Work”) centers on a group of legionnaires undertaking near continuous training. Galoup, second-in-command to Bruno Forestier—a source of admiration, envy, fascination, and love—becomes consumed by jealousy after Sentain, a new arrival to the regiment, heroically rescues a fellow soldier during a training exercise gone wrong. The approbation Sentain receives from Forestier provokes Galoup’s obsessive fixation with this quiet new recruit, leading to underhanded attempts to eliminate him from the cohort.
Beau Travail is “slow” cinema in the sense that it’s plot remains fairly schematic and unfurls at an unhurried pace. Instead, visually representing men moving in space constitutes the film’s primary interest. The choreographed (regimented) nature of the legion’s training—coordinated bodies operating in controlled unison—assumes the aspect of dance and provides an interpretative frame through which to approach the film. (Scenes of the same soldiers in nightclubs offer a visual foil.) On a dance floor, bodies liberate themselves from the movements that regulate quotidian life, finding expression in novel configurations. By contrast, staged dance performance manages the body, demanding harmonious coordination (and, by extension, physical command of oneself and one’s surrounding space). Group dance requires the individual to subordinate themselves in service of the whole—the soloist derives their power only in relation to the larger arrangement. This tension between independence and constriction, between self-expression and self-discipline, comes to represent the poles between which Galoup operates. Within the regiment, Galoup’s identity orients around both his subordination (to the Legion’s ideals; to Forestier) and his unique superiority (as second-in-command). Sentain thus threatens a carefully orchestrated balance. It hardly matters whether this is a function of Galoup’s imagination or not.
Denis herself grew up the daughter of a French colonial administrator in West Africa and has long been interested in outsiders and outsiderness, both within sub-Saharan African settings (Chocolat, White Material) and France (35 Shots of Rum). In Djibouti, the legionnaires foreignness initially seems to reinforce their cohesion—only when examined in isolation does it unravel. One might see Galoup as a sort of personification of France (the Foreign Legion remains a quintessentially French institution after all) unsettled in a post-colonial world whose terms remain difficult to comprehend. Denis’ editing and sense of landscape—depicted through cuts that play on visual contrasts and extreme long shots—underscore the alien quality of the legionnaires’ presence by placing them within lunar-like topographies and unforgiving terrains. In Beau Travail, the soldiers remain out of place, divorced from their surroundings, in a space without being of a space.1
As a female director turning the camera on male-dominated environments, Denis’ interest in foreign/alien spaces provides an interesting frame with which to approach the film’s relationship to gender. Of course, this can become its own interpretive straightjacket, but it is noteworthy that the all-male environments depicted necessarily incorporate acts of domesticity, play, and intimacy that undermine strict binaries. The women present in the film are local Djiboutians, usually the soldiers’ romantic partners or desired as such. They function as a sort of Greek chorus, a bit like the men in Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019).2 At one point in Beau Travail, Galoup’s girlfriend, Rahel, breaks the fourth wall, identifying with the viewer, orienting our perception, and inviting us to contemplate these strange men and their strange dynamics.
Go Down The Claire Denis Rabbit Hole With:
Claire Denis — White Material (2009)
Claire Denis — 35 Shots of Rum (2008)
Prior to embarking on her directorial career, Denis worked as an Assistant Director on Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas (1984), another film deeply invested in capturing men within lifeless habitats.
Diop acted in Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum and her really excellent film Atlantics shares a number of affinities with Denis’ work.