Claire Denis (1999)

Inspired by Billy Budd, Claire Denis’s Beau Travail takes place in present-day Djibouti, where Herman Melville’s sailors have become soldiers in the French Foreign Legion.  Chief Adjutant Galoup (Denis Lavant) is the protagonist in Denis’s and Jean-Pol Fargeau’s screenplay and more sympathetically treated than Master-of-Arms Claggart, his equivalent in the original set-up.  Galoup’s commanding officer is Lieutenant Colonel Forestier (Michel Subor).  The Billy Budd equivalent, a newcomer to the section of legionnaires, is Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin).  Unlike the cast of Peter Ustinov’s shipbound 1962 film of Melville’s novella, Beau Travail’s features women, albeit in minor parts.  They include an African girl (Marta Tafesse Kassa) with whom Galoup goes out dancing, when he and his men are off duty.

There’s plenty of choreography – in Denis’s presentation of the legionnaires’ training exercises, as well as the brief sequences in local dance clubs.  Her strong visual sense includes a fine eye for colour that keeps coming through – in descriptions of Djibouti social life, the red terrain seen by the soldiers from a train window as they travel to the area, the play of light on water.  Denis’s and her DP Agnès Godard’s observation of the legionnaires’ bodies at work (especially during an assault course sequence) and at play (swimming in the sea) is often imaginative and arresting.  Had the director concentrated on images to the virtual exclusion of non-visual narrative conventions, the film might have been more demanding to watch but easier to admire for the novelty of its approach.

She doesn’t, though.  She also has Galoup narrating events in recollection, from his home in Marseille, where he’s writing a memoir.  It isn’t something you’d expect this wiry man of action, for whom military service has been not just a way of life but a raison d’etre, to be doing.  Galoup comes up with insights like ‘I admired him without knowing why’ (of Forestier) and ‘That day something overpowering took hold of my heart’.  Another day brings the sense of ‘something menacing’.  His inability to analyse his impressions reinforces the puzzle of why he’s putting pen to paper in the first place.  Claire Denis’s recourse to Galoup’s voiceover is frustrating.  Denis Lavant doesn’t need it:  his face and body in the Djibouti scenes tell us more of what the character is experiencing inside his head than retrospective words do.  It would be different if we got a sense of  Galoup’s exasperation at not being able to make verbal sense of his feelings; all that we actually get is woolly phrases like the ones quoted above.  Galoup’s imposed reflections do no more than dilute the force of his hostility towards Sentain by trying (though failing) to articulate it.

Those familiar with the Ustinov film will have a good idea of what drives antagonism towards its title character.  Just as well because Galoup’s animus is unaccountable in the wrong way: unlike Terence Stamp’s Billy, Grégoire Colin as Sentain doesn’t stand out as exceptionally beautiful and charming.  Perhaps Denis means to exploit the idea that military service de-individualises those partaking of it.  In any event, Nicolas Duvauchelle (in his film debut) was the only member of the group who registered with this viewer – and I already knew him from other roles.  Michel Subor does solid work as Forestier but Denis Lavant’s extraordinary presence dominates.  His charismatic Galoup eclipses Sentain, which contradicts an essential theme of the material.  A major plot difference is that Sentain, in spite of Galoup’s efforts, survives.  Grégoire Colin’s lack of vitality makes this matter less than it surely should.

Denis includes excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s opera of Billy Budd on the soundtrack – just the thing to earn her cultural brownie points but otherwise meaningless.  The only exciting music comes in the last scene, which is also the only bit of the film I wished had gone on for longer.  Denis Lavant performs a characteristically acrobatic solo dance in a Djibouti night club to Corona’s ‘Rhythm of the Night’.  The preceding scene in Galoup’s lonely room in Marseille indicates that he’s about to end his life with the pistol that he’s clutching.  In this final, mysterious sequence, which follows (playing over the closing credits), there’s a real synergy of sight and sound.

I disliked both the Claire Denis films I’d seen previously (White Material and Let the Sunshine In) but felt I should try this one, which is widely regarded as her masterpiece.  Duty done, I can give her other work a miss.  ‘Remorse is the beginning of liberty’, says Galoup’s voiceover at one point.  He then repeats this aperçu, adding ‘I heard that somewhere …’  It was probably in a French movie not unlike Beau Travail.

16 November 2018