Beau
Travail
Not
rated
Cinema
21
616 NW 21st
Ave., 223-4515
7 and 8:55
pm Friday-Thursday, plus 1, 3 and 5 pm Saturday-Sunday, Aug.
4-10
The soundtrack
to Beau Travail includes excerpts from Benjamin Britten's
opera Billy Budd and "Safeway Cart" by Neil Young
and Crazy Horse.
In addition to
Jarmusch and Wenders, Denis has also worked with acclaimed
filmmakers Jacques Rivette and Constantin Costa-Gavras.
Thoreau once wrote, "We seem but to linger in manhood to
tell the dreams of our childhood." No doubt filmmaker Claire
Denis would agree. The daughter of a French civil servant,
Denis grew up in Africa before returning to Paris as a teen.
After learning to make films under Jim Jarmusch and Wim
Wenders (she was a technician on Down By Law, Wings
of Desire and Paris, Texas), Denis returned to
Africa to make her 1988 debut, Chocolat, and stayed
for good. Eleven years and eight films later, Beau Travail
reveals like never before Denis' gift for evoking Africa's
beauty and unhurried pace with dreamy, childlike wonder.
Beau Travail is set around a French Foreign Legion
outpost in the desolate, radiant east African enclave of
Djibouti, a former French colony between Ethiopia and Somalia.
Known to most Americans by name only, the Legion is a volunteer
professional fighting unit made of both foreigners seeking
refuge and natives seeking adventure. Sharing a common desire
to flee their past, Legionnaires form a pseudo family bound
by impeccable discipline and vigorous training. The regiment
is their lifeline. The mostly anonymous Legionnaires in
Beau Travail don't have any real enemies to fight
anymore, but most are too busy with personal struggles to
notice.
As Denis understands, this obsolescence makes their rituals
and monastic ways all the more curious. Her camera lingers
wistfully as soldiers stretch in perfect unison along a
stark white swatch of coastline--arms up, eyes closed, shirts
off--like dancers in a surreal boot-camp ballet, or as they
perform endless military drills with a crisp precision that
matches the creases in their pants. With the eye of a fashion
photographer and the devotion of a nun, Denis makes watching
their monotonous lives hypnotic.
A loose adaptation of Melville's Billy Budd, Beau
Travail chronicles a burgeoning rift between Sgt. Galoup
(Denis Lavant), the outpost's second-in-command, and a new
recruit called Sentain (Grégoire Colin). When a daring
rescue at sea suddenly makes Sentain a hero, Galoup ironically
finds it grounds for suspicion and contempt. As Galoup recalls
in rueful narration, the Legion's ritual and discipline
ultimately become a vacuum of spit-shined subordination,
in which getting noticed--even for something good--is an
offense akin to talking in church.
This is the crux of Beau Travail, an exploration
of how we often submit to something larger than ourselves--groups,
causes, nations--in a desperate quest for security and identity,
giving up something precious in the process. Watching Denis'
lush, poetic visuals--a glimmering turquoise sea against
a breezy, arid desert, or the cryptic expression on a soldier's
weathered face as he stares into the distance over a cigarette--it's
easy to appreciate the allure of losing yourself, as the
soldiers do in the infinite landscape of Africa or through
the rigid code of the Legion. This notion helps the film
transcend soldiers or petty squabbles or even Denis' beloved
Africa. Ultimately Beau Travail is about something
deeper and more elusive, for Claire Denis doesn't just tell
a story: She casts a spell.
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