Beau Travail (2002)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Never mind the pseudo-psycho plot that is really just undeveloped, the music that is mainly purloined or the character development that is really nil. The scenery and the physicality are worth it. Imagine a place whose most interesting geographical feature is an immense salt flat stretching to the jagged mountains on the horizon, and you'll get the idea. It's hard to believe the French Foreign Legion is this romantic, but the bodies are certainly worth the show.No one seems to have observed that "beau travail" can be play on words in French. It can mean "beautiful work" but it can also mean "empty" or "vain" work. Clever.

I think the way Claire Denis tells her story is amongst the most special in the world currently.Here she shows a relationship between men, in a really sensitive and smart way.I think there are also similarities in the way the episodes are connected into a big story, to another film of her, "Intruder".Her characters are always more than just a "character", they are full human beings whose actions are always surprising yet still believable. Especially the character of Galoup.If I had to choose films not for their pure quality as entertainment, but as a valuable cultural thing, this one is on my top ten list.

Films with traditional narratives are all right, I guess, but once in a while it becomes necessary to immerse yourself in a movie that eschews complete narrative coherence. Beau Travail, which follows a tale similar to Melville's Billy Budd, is one such movie. It's not confounding in the manner of an Eraserhead; you will not find yourself forever scratching your head, wondering what on earth the director was aiming for. Quite the opposite: It's a languid dissection of one (noticeably ugly) man's attempt to destroy a thing of beauty--Sentain. What's most interesting to me is that, in the sand of Djibouti, Sentain is not the only beautiful man, nor is he the only thing of beauty. Galoup's desire to destroy Sentain is, as a result, slightly arbitrary and therefore more resonant than it would be in another setting. What is astounding, and slightly confounding in this film, is its slightly elliptical story-telling. The scenes here do follow a chronology, but, simultaneously, layer upon one another. The moments depicted could occur at any moment in relation to any other moment. The precise connection between one scene and the next is not entirely necessary to watch the film. This is a frustrating position for some viewers, I suppose, because it demands a little more of your attention. However, the feelings conjured by this sort of narrative style are immensely pleasurable. I feel, watching this movie, as if I am floating, eyes-closed, upon the sea at night; the loss of concrete perception thrills and frightens you at the same time.Such storytelling also gives Beau Travail a hallucinatory quality that complements the equally hallucinatory visual scheme. Claire Denis is among the most impressive visual stylists working in cinema today. She has a sense of color, composition, and light that is both painterly and remarkably cinematic. Her framing and compositions are not quite epic, but they approach that feeling. All in all, Beau Travail is truly a handsome work and one that I urge adventurous movie- lovers to seek out.

Introspective and subtle, Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL offers a modern retelling of Herman Melville's BILLY BUDD, transposing the tale of an officer who self-destructs through his jealousy of a new recruit to an outpost of the French Foreign Legion. And although the film is elegant in both its simplicity and purity, I myself found it a shade too simple and pure to be completely effective.Still, BEAU TRAVAIL has two things going for it: director Denis' cinematic eye and superior performances throughout. One truly senses the location in all its elemental nature, and the cinematography is remarkable for its restrained elegance. The cast follows suit, with direct and underplayed performances that fold seamlessly into both Denis' atmosphere and the story itself, and the result is often quite stylish.But for all its elegance and style, I found BEAU TRAVAIL too introspective and subtle for its own good; to me it lacks any significant substance, with both story and characters slipping through my attention as easily as sand slips through my hand. While this is doubtlessly part of director Denis' intent, and while I have admired many a film with a notably elusive touch, my ultimate reaction to BEAU TRAVAIL is that it is a rather superficial exercise in style over substance, and I cannot say that it leads me to interest in the director's other work.In passing, I also note that BEAU TRAVAIL is often marketed as a film with homoerotic context and imagery, but I personally did not find it so. Final word: worth a look, but not greatly memorable for all that.Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer