Beau travail (1999)
Directed by Claire Denis
Pyramide Distribution, 92 minutes, Not-rated
In French with subtitles
★★
French auteur Claire Denis scored big with her first feature Chocolat (1988). Critics and film professors loved her 1999 film Beau travail and hailed it as a masterpiece. But audiences, especially in North America, didn't know what to make of it. It's a very austere film that mirrors the detachment of the three principal characters.
Although it is based loosely on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, much about Beau travail is distant and unfamiliar. Unless you can endure slow pacing, uncertain motives, and the ambiguity of events that might or might not be playing out before your eyes, you could find Beau travail a cold, unrelatable film that does not justify its kudos.
My use of the term “cold” is deliberately ironic, as it takes place in a blazing hot and parched section of the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti near the end of French colonial rule (1977). It involves a French Foreign Legion outpost in which we sense its commander (Michel Subor) and his adjunct-chef (think sergeant) Galoup (Denis Levant) know they are playing a meaningless role in a dying drama. They appear bored, but maintain the fiction of discipline out of an equally outmoded sense of honor. Or perhaps they think they can position themselves for some future advancement. Like most things in Beau travail, motives are hard to ascertain.
Gung ho recruit Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) is the fly in the ointment. He works hard to impress, apparently unaware that he is breaking a stint of malaise. When he helps rescue a helicopter crew, he is popular with other soldiers, but this somehow makes Galoup jealous. Why?
Exactly! This is unclear because the film is told in flashbacks from Galoup’s point of view and he would probably be considered an unreliable narrator. That is, if he spoke more than a handful of words. Thus, we don't know whether his point of view is what occurred, an ex post facto salve to a guilty conscience, a dream, or fiction from the get- go. To top it off, there appears to be unrequited homoeroticism on Galoup’s part. Does he wish to train, kill, or sodomize Sentain?
Gallup drives Sentain to an arid salt pan and dumps him out to find his way back to base. Temperatures in Djibouti are routinely over 100°F and a broken compass is the only clue we have of his fate. Did he die? Did nomads save him? Did he dessert? Even the film's title is enigmatic. It can mean good work or beautiful work, and in this case the small gradations of meaning probably matter.
Beau travail is as much an intellectual exercise as a movie–a montage of landscape, simmering tension, clashing colors, black bodies, white bodies, uniformed commanders, stripped-to-the-waist soldiers, sweat, and precariousness.
Does all of this add up to significance or nothing at all? The ending of the film is memorable, but weird. It's a kind of Greek chorus but is it Zorba-like joy or a signifier of tragedy? You tell me.
Rob Weir
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