A group of soldiers in the French Legion train in a terrifying desert. They perform calisthenics that take on a ritual and choreographic aspect. Although the subject of Beau Travail, Claire Denis' remarkably intelligent and inventive 2000 film, is preparation for war and the lives of soldier-males, the picture is, in effect, about the education of a dancer -- Denis Lavant plays the protagonist and, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the dance-like exercises, the quick marches through the horrific desert, the stretching and limbering up on the alkaline flats in which the men writhe and contort themselves in the dust like synchronized swimmers are, somehow, ends in themselves. The movies's principal character either shoots himself or expires in an ecstasy of dance or both -- the men are training either for suicide or some kind of choreographic transfiguration.
Beau Travail occurs in Djibouti, a tiny country on the horn of Africa, about which you know nothing. The place was formerly called French Somaliland and it is bordered by Somalia proper on the north and Eritrea (formerly part of Ethiopia) on the west and south. For some reason, the French maintain a Foreign Legion post on the shores of a vast salt lake. (Apparently, this is Lake Assal.) The post is an extraordinary location -- the huts and shacks stand on unprotected headlands where an oven-like wind booms day and night, stirring up white caps in the bright green and turquoise waters of the lake. At the post, there are some barracks in which workers involved in the hellish activity of extracting salt from crystalline flats surrounding the agitated water once lived. Several cinder cones poke up from the waters and there are huge, stone mountain overlooking the enormous crater (it's a rift valley) where the lake is located. Nearby, there's a city built from white cement blocks where beautiful young girls dance robotically, as if entranced, to disco music in clubs that cater to the French servicemen. Events in Djibouti are intercut with shots of the protagonist, drill sergeant Galoup, living in Marseilles after the occurrence of the African story. Galoup is utterly alone in the big French city and we seem him engaged in strange activities, particularly standing in a tree and maniacally hacking off its branches. He seems to be writing some kind of memoir.
At the Foreign Legion post, Galoup serves his commander Bruno Forestier. Bruno is a burnt-out case -- he no longer cares about his command and spends his time listlessly chewing qat in the city. Life at the legion post consists of endless exercises, marching, cooking food, and ceaselessly ironing uniforms so that their seams are precisely even. The men go into town periodically to dance with the girls in the disco. Galoup is keeping a woman in town, a very great beauty, but he thinks that she despises him. (Near the end of the film, we see him misinterpreting her words to a friend -- in fact, she likes him a lot.) A new recruit appears at the Post -- this is Sentain. Sentain turns out to be the ideal soldier and, even, rescues a man from a helicopter crash in the lake. For some inexplicable reason, Galoup despises Sentain. The attentive viewer will grasp that the situation is parallel to the plot of Melville's Billy Budd -- Sentain plays the role of the handsome sailor (or soldier) Billy who is hated by his officer, Claggart. "Starry" Vere, the commander of the ship, The Rights of Man, here is represented by the ineffectual and drug-addicted Forestier. Beau Travail deviates substantially from Melville's short novel -- the novel seems merely to be the inspiration for the premise that Galoup inexplicably hates Sentain and wants to destroy him. Critics regard Billy Budd as encoded with homosexual imagery -- Beau Travail makes a few gestures in this direction (for instance Galoup looking on with horror as Sentain cradles the wounded helicopter crewman in his arms) but Denis' film can't be reduced to an allegory of about a self-hating Gay man confronting his demons (and desire) with respect to the beautiful young sailor. In fact, Denis' Galoup is clearly heterosexual and has a beautiful girl friend. (One of Denis' themes in many of her movies is how young men will abandon sex with their women to engage in more "masculine" activities, mostly associated with war -- this is integral to her later film White Material) When one of the legionnaires sneaks off base to attend religious services (he's a Muslim and we're told its Ramadan), the soldier is punished for deserting his post. Galoup makes the man dig a hole in the desert soil until his hands are bloody and he's delirious from thirst. When Sentain tries to give the soldier a canteen of water, there's a confrontation with Galoup and Sentain apparently punches him -- this part of the film is edited in a dream-like fashion and its not totally clear what is real and what is imagined. Galoup seizes this event as a way to consummate his revenge -- he drives Sentain far out into the desert and leaves him to walk back to the post, but with a compass that has been sabotaged. Sentain staggers to the edge of the salt lake where he collapses in a gypsum-white field of salt and, apparently, dies. Forestier knows what Galoup has done, strips him of his authority, and sends the man back to France where he is court-martialed and, then, ends of living alone in Marseille. A couple of closing shots show that Sentain has been rescued and will presumably survive -- he's riding in a bus, semi-comatose, but cared for by a woman who pours water into his mouth. In Marseille, Galoup makes his bed military style and, then, lies down with a gun cradled on his belly. We see a vein in his bicep throbbing. In the film's remarkable final sequence, Denis dances ecstatically in the empty discotheque in Djibouti, leaping and hurling himself around to the sound of "The Rhythm of the Night." in front of a fractured wall of mirrors. (Denis Lavant's performance as Galoup is extraordinary -- he's a little man with an ugly face, sort of like a toad-like Humphrey Bogart, but Lavant has a fantastic physical presence and he dances like Gene Kelley.)
This account of the plot of Beau Travail creates a false impression of the film because the movie's major elements are non-narrative. Denis' camera lingers on the beautiful soldiers who are mostly bare-chested, laboring in the hot desert sun. She shows them engaged in weird rituals in which they hug one another and, then, butt chests, or in which they form a tight circle about their commander rhythmically swaying forward and backward. The calisthenic exercise scenes, which become increasingly balletic, are scored to disco music or Benjamin Britten's surging male choruses from his opera version of Billy Budd. In one scene, the soldiers fast march across the volcanic wasteland to Neil Young's song "Safeway Cart". The otherworldly landscape creates the impression that Denis is recording the strange ceremonies of a hitherto unknown tribe. We sense the deep attraction that these sorts of exercises exert on the character of Galoup -- this is his life and there is nothing that he would rather be doing than leading his men in war games in the nightmarish desert. When these group activities, this perverse camaraderie taken from him he has nothing at all. In Melville's Billy Budd, the perverse hatred that Claggart feels for the hero is viewed as perverse and inexplicable -- we don't know why Claggart acts as he does. Denis' film is even more uncompromising -- she even removes the repressed homosexual motivation that Melville intimates in Claggart's envy and terror; Galoup has as his girlfriend the prettiest woman in the city. Beau Travail is a remarkable film that creates its own aura of inexplicable mystery, an uncanny aspect to the movie that emphasized by the robotic dancing of the girls in the bar, the bizarre sound track, the military exercises that morph into modern dance, and, of course, the dream landscape of the vast toxic lake and the cinder desert. Ultimately, the film is indeterminate -- we know, more or less, what happened, but not why.
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