Claire Denis' loose adaptation of Herman Melville's novel BILLY BUDD, BEAU TRAVAIL, her fifth feature, continues her narratological stream of consciousness, and whiskers audience to the foreign, exceptionally magnificent Djibouti, where resides a squad of French legionnaires, and our protagonist is adjutant -chef Galoup (Lavant), who recounts in voiceover of the story between him and a fellow soldier Gilles Sentain (Colin).
The story is elliptical, though, negating a linear narrative and minimizing the usage of dialogue (no bull sessions are permitted), what Denis steadfastly concretizes is a state of living of those men (including a 18-year-old Nicolas Duvauchelle), marooned in a foreign land, viewed with vigilance and curiosity by the locals, under disciplinarian commandments. Their common links of confraternity and masculinity are illustrated through sequences of rigid trainings (fatality pops up even in peace time), where their ((interracially wiry) half -naked bodies glistening moistly under ray of sunshine, and corporeal contacts are titillated through a becalmed solemnity, Denis masterfully counterpoises a sensualized female gaze to the dominant male one (those uniforms and green berets!), sans traces of vulgarity or perversity.
But the catch is the perennial green-eyed monster, Galoup's composure cracks when he feels threatened by Sentain's confidence and Adonis pulchritude, especially when Commandant Forestier (Subor) takes a shine to the latter, a prerogative Galoup wants to keep exclusive to himself, yet profoundly, he also feels attracted by Sentain (who doesn't, anyway?), to what extent would he do to snuff his latent desire, even by sabotaging the only way of life he knows of? Denis' existential study on masculine repressed sexuality slits like a scalpel almost vanishingly into the Freudian flesh, there is an elegant brevity, or lightness in it, that is vastly different from male directors.
Denis' long-time collaborator, cinematographer Agnès Godard, is another kingpin in crystallizing BEAU TRAVAIL's sublime beauty, aesthetically records the natural picturesqueness of the desert land, the Red Sea (with volcanic islands nearby) and the salt pan, also soulfully captures the denizens with distinct distance lest it would impose an eroticizing angle on them (as most occidental pictures do), although regretfully, the film doesn't venture much outside the circle of the Legion.
Lavant flaunts his strangely alluring rugged physicality in one of his more tamed performances, that is until he reveals his free-styling agility synchronized with Corona's disco hit THE RHYTHM OF THE NIGHT right in the coda, which Leos Carax would put into great play in HOLY MOTORS (2012). As for BEAU TRAVAIL, it boldly attests, take it or lump it, Denis' unique style (her humane sensibility and unorthodox clarity) has officially come to stay.
referential entries: Denis' HIGH LIFE (2018, 7.6/10); Leos Carax's HOLY MOTORS (2012, 7.6/10); Rainer Werner Fassbinder's QUERELLE (1982, 7.8/10).
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