Beau Travail

A baffling oddity, Claire Denis' "Beau Travail" (1999) translates Melville's "Billy Budd" to the French Foreign Legion. The movie enjoys considerable critical prestige; this is also baffling to me. Certainly, the film is audacious and unusual, but seems so willfully bizarre and perverse that I think it is hard to take this experiment seriously. Denis seems to have set about to make a campy, homosexual joke. But the film's beautiful photography and otherworldly settings conpsire to impart gravitas to the picture and, somewhere in the process, Denis began to take her project seriously; what started out as a SNL skit, it seems, evolved into something lavish, strange, and febrile. The result is a movie that is better in theory than actual practice, a picture that is more interesting to discuss, probably, than to watch since the experience of viewing the film is bewildering. There is something characteristically French, I think, about this adaptation of the Melville novella -- Denis creates a film that misreads Melville's text on every possible level, gets the plot wrong as to who kills whom, and omits the ethical, moral, and metaphysical dimensions of the great writer's parable about rebellion and justice. What's left is fashion, style, a glittering and strange surface, the movie equivalent of outrageous garments displayed as a cubist haute couture parade, gestures and landscapes presented to an audience swift to detect allusion, "hommage," and, of course, irony. It's very beautiful and immensely compelling and completely shallow -- intensely (profoundly) shallow: Melville's fable of the beautiful sailor sacrificed to Empire converted to conflict between the ugly, stubby Master Sergeant Galoup (played by the extraordinary Denis Lavant) and the half-nude beautiful soldier boy, Gilles Sentain. Melville's dimension of goodness and innocence assaulted by perverse Iago-inflected evil is transformed into the story of a rivalry between a handsome man and an ugly one. Denis invokes Melville's queasy homo-eroticism and the film shares the American writer's interest in the group dynamics of warrior males isolated and far from women. From time to time, we see the Foreign Legionaires performing dance-like calisthenics, entranced by the African sunlight, and periodically engaged in duel-like "pas de deux" ballet sequences on the edge of a malevolent-looking sea. Often these antics are choreographed to music sampled from Britten's opera of "Billy Budd." (Denis also scores the film to Neil Young's "Safeway Cart" and bubbly, sweet-sounding Afro-pop music.) Levant's Sergeant Galoup seems less a soldier than some kind of demented scout-master -- he leads his troops on dance-excursions into the lava wasteland around the men's remote camp where they are building a road through immense fields of scarcely congealed magma. Denis' point seems to be that the men's activities are heavily feminine -- they are constantly ironing their clothes, doing laundry, making their cots, and, instead of practicing for combat, their exercises increasingly seem to be preparations for some kind of ballet -- the men bump into one another repeatedly like performers in a Pina Bausch dance and, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that the incessant training is not for battle but for performance with Alvin Ailey or an all-male version of Swan Lake. There is no enemy. The commander chews khat leaves and is intoxicated most of the time. The men have girlfriends, apparently prostitutes in a Djibouti bar, and there are many shots of the women, bored and languorous, half-dancing in the big city discoteque -- in fact, the film begins with a dance sequence in a disco that is indelibly scored and cut, a dream-like montage of fantastically beautiful and exotic women swaying back and forth with stoned, mask-like faces on a glittering and dark dance-floor. Mostly, the women dance alone although sometimes the Legionaires in their funny, tall hats join them Once the film departs the city and the blandishments of the somnambulent prostitutes, the movie retreats into a spectacularly barren hermitage, the little legionaire's encampment on a barren plateau above a sea studded with carbuncle-like volcanoes in glistening turquoise water, wind roaring off the basalt cliffs and the men engaged in Sisyphean activity of chopping and cutting and sorting and painting boulders. We see fire burning on the emerald-turquoise water after a helicopter crashes and the beautiful soldier is sent to his death carrying a bad compass, perishing on a gleaming expanse of salt crystals like shards of broken glass. Afflicted by guilt over his role in murdering the beautiful soldier, Galoup who has fled to Marseilles, writes his memoirs in balcony shaded by a strangely scabrous tree, and, at last, commits suicide, baring his torso on which is tattooed the words "Serve the Good Cause and Die." In the famous final shot, Galoup is alone in a discoteque: music plays and he dances a serpentine, fantastically swift and athletic dance. Denis seems to have wanted to make a "queer-inflected" version of old French Foreign Legion chestnuts like "Beau Geste" -- and she seems also to have been influenced by Leos Carax operatically romantic films (and it is interesting that Carax "Pola X", also an adaptation of a Melville novel was also releaed in the same year). Denis' picture in turn seems to have influenced the deliriously homo-erotic imagery in Sokurov's 2003 "Father and Son" -- also a picture about warrior males with little or no access to women. But, to a skeptical eye, the film, however, suggests nothing more than "Footloose", the Kevin Bacon picture about a kid exiled to a rural community where dancing is forbidden...I mean the dude just has to dance!