Film - Jonathan Romney on the beautiful work of Claire Denis
It's not unusual to see a film and to find that one, especially resonant image stays with you. But with Claire Denis's Beau Travail, it feels as if you could isolate any one of its shots or sequences and it could encapsulate the entire film. When a group of legionnaires run a practice assault on the skeletal framework of a building, it could stand for the way Denis strips the army film to its bare bones; rows of fatigues drying on lines evoke the soldiers themselves, reduced to interchangeable figures staked out in a landscape. But often the images can't be milked for simple meanings: they just have a hard, irreducible presence that transcends the film's narrative or its metaphoric drift. They have the same stark autonomy as the film's desert setting; more than that, they have the elusive ring of absolute necessity.
This is the eighth feature by the French director, but it is her first to be released in Britain since her 1988 debut Chocolat, a relatively straight vignette about growing up in colonial Africa. Since then, Denis's work has been increasingly terse and telegraphic, and Beau Travail takes her penchant for ellipsis to a dazzling new level. She's the kind of director you can imagine reshaping a film entirely at the editing stage, refitting its narrative into a free-form mosaic. Not that Beau Travail is designed to perplex, but its sinuous discontinuity engages the viewer's imagination to the maximum; it feels like a particularly austere dream that you can't shake off.
Denis's anecdote of jealousy and vengeance in the French Foreign Legion is inspired by Herman Melville's story Billy Budd, about an innocent sailor martyred for the jealousy he inspires in his superior officer, the malevolent Claggart. Denis's story belongs to Claggart, here renamed Galoup; it begins with him exiled in Marseille, recounting the events that led to his being drummed out of the legion. His tragedy really is a fall from Eden; bleak as the Djibouti camp is, it's where he belongs. Acting as a fondly fierce watchdog to his men, he serves a distant, fatigued commander, Forestier (played by Michel Subor), who was a character of the same name - conceivably a younger version of the same character - in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Le Petit Soldat.
On one level, Galoup's lost idyll is straightfowardly homoerotic - a Spartan utopia in which muscular, shaven-headed young men leap walls, walk wires and execute elegantly brutal manoeuvres like animated statues under the sun. In these sequences, the narrative fractures into abstract dance; Denis worked closely with a choreographer, Bernardo Montet. Regarded by the locals with wry amusement, the soldiers seem to have no real function in Djibouti, other than to practise their bizarrely arduous form of performance art.
On another level, the legionnaires' world is aggressively heterosexual; in a nightclub, they engage in wary flirtation with African women dancing to Islamic-themed disco. But they are as much separated from the women by their maleness as they are from Africa by their colonial authority. Arguably, the film's predominant theme is military authority and the mixture of solitude, disempowerment and even servitude that it entails. Galoup's post estranges him from his men, and he's often seen in a servant's role, rather than a commander's, washing up or laying out the places for the troops at table.
But it seems almost reductive to discuss Beau Travail's meaning, rather than the way it works. Denis was inspired by Melville's poems as well as his story, and Beau Travail is poetic in the sense that its discrete, highly plastic images - a salt-bleached ram's skull, a burst of blood in green water - form something like a succession of lines for the viewer to connect into an overall pattern. The photographer Agnes Godard has a flawless eye for the placement of bodies in the desert landscape, and Denis matches her images with an always unexpected use of music - choruses from Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd for the dance-like rituals; a hypnotic Neil Young song for a desert march.
The actors, too, are used for their sculptural physical being: Gregoire Colin's recruit isolated against a blue sky; Subor's languid basilisk features seemingly calcified by legion life. Galoup is played by Denis Lavant, the commandingly weather-beaten lead of Leos Carax's first three films; here older and craggier, with the tortured troglodyte physique of an Egon Schiele portrait, Lavant has a galvanising energy. He stores up his tensions as if in an emotional battery, then releases them in the final scene, dancing a convulsive solo as if shaking the demons out of his body; set to a rivetingly brainless piece of Euro-disco, this is a marvel of recent cinema.
Beau Travail feels endlessly watchable - I've seen it three times and I know I'll see it again. You can tell it was a tough film to make, and not just by the way the actors are sweating. Cast and film-makers alike seem physically and imaginatively pushed to the limit, and the result is a sense of place and action that is so specific to it that Beau Travail resembles no other film I know. It's mesmerising, like a season in hell.
Beau Travail (15) is at the Renoir, the Curzon Soho and the Ritzy, London
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