BEAU TRAVAIL
by Chris Dashiell

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel - below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel - there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.
-- Matthew Arnold

In her latest film, BEAU TRAVAIL, Claire Denis has taken on a seemingly impossible challenge - to evoke with images the "central stream of what we feel" while emptying the picture of all but the most rudimentary words, thoughts and story. The result is a work in which meaning is subliminal and subconscious, a film of fragmented memory and peripheral vision.

Her source - Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor - is really the faintest bit of framework on which Denis can practice her peculiar method. The time has been changed to the present day, the characters and setting to a unit of the French Foreign Legion stationed near the seashore of Djibouti, in northeast Africa. Or to be more accurate, the setting is inside the head of Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) as he summons memories of the Legion while passing his days in exile in Marseilles. But while the usual movie flashback retains the continuity of traditional narrative, Galoup's memories are pure image - disjointed, discrete, and almost completely silent except for music.

It takes more time to outline the story than the time Denis devotes to it. Galoup idolizes his commander, Bruno Forestier. (The same name and character as the young assassin in Godard's Le Petit Soldat, now much older - and the same actor playing him, Michel Subor.) A new recruit, Sentain (Gregoire Colin) wins the love and admiration of the other legionnaires, as much through an indefinable purity as through his heroism, and wins praise from Forestier as well, which sends Galoup into a downward spiral of jealousy. For Denis, these elements are mere facts, a backdrop for her concerns, rather than ideas to explore as an author does in a story. Her extremely avante- garde approach to story is the source of Beau Travail's unusual power. At times it is also, I must confess, exasperating. To explain both responses is a difficult task, since the attempt to translate the film's visual style into words goes against the grain of its method.

First of all, then, Denis is concerned with men's relationship to their own bodies. The careful way the legionnaires move and look at themselves, the way they shave, iron their clothes, make their beds - the film focuses on these simple rituals with intensely focused concentration. (To call the film's preoccupation with young male bodies homoerotic is, I think, to use sexual categories in a much more narrow way than Denis intends.) The bonding together of these men is on a primal level, like a tribe existing before time and civilization. The film also shows Galoup performing similar rituals in his tiny apartment in Marseilles years later - combing his hair, ironing his shirt, regarding himself severely in the mirror. Except now he is alone, and the experience is empty compared to the illuminated memory images of his time in Djibouti. His regret, and the film's feeling of absence, is for men together in a mystically unified group, together in solitude.

It is no accident that Denis has chosen the Foreign Legion to represent this group. For unlike other possible occupations, the activities of these young men are a series of absurd dead ends. They practice endlessly for battles that will never happen,
preparing for imaginary conflicts in an imaginary world of action, disguising the essential inertness of their life. The film's most beautiful sequences depict military exercises on the beach, with the men jumping over barricades or running obstacle courses, these alternating with strange unnamed rituals in which they stand facing the sun with their arms upraised, or quickly jump into each other's arms - Britten's opera Billy Budd on the soundtrack, lending a bizarre, disorienting flavor to the images.

Surrounding the little world of the legionnaires, but not touching them, are the natives of Djibouti. Their eyes see something different, but if they have wisdom, they don't share it. There are scenes in a disco where the young men go on leave, men from all over the world who have no other home or family but here. Even in dancing, memory creates distance. The young women in the disco - are they local girls, prostitutes? - dance with beautiful, contained composure, staring into the eye of the camera with a look of imperturbable serenity. It seems they are from another realm, and can't be approached, only remembered.

Denis also draws attention to a vast and unclaimed aspect of
experience - the realm of routine. What percentage of our lives is spent performing routine actions, getting from one place to another, or simply maintaining our conditions in some way? A much higher one, it is certain, than we spend in dramatic or decisive action. Beau Travail sets its sights on the utterly mundane, the ordinary, the waiting around, the act of doing nothing important. This is where the film can be exasperating. It's as if Denis stretches the time between climactic moments into a long, unwavering gaze - and then perversely eliminates the climaxes themselves, or attenuates them into an elliptical brevity that mocks the viewer's desire for closure. This is often a difficult film to watch, and even though I admire the director's severity, I admit wondering if her purpose couldn't have been fulfilled better in a shorter time. The film's subliminal language of images burned itself into my mind, but it also taxed my attention. Its energy is mostly static, frozen in endlessly repeatable postures. Only Galoup's narration provides any context, and he is a taciturn and inarticulate man. Beau Travail is practically a silent, storyless movie.

"Freedom begins with remorse," says Galoup as he wanders the streets of Marseilles. He regrets his memories but doesn't know how to let go of them. It seems as if his life can only lead to one end. But the film also imagines another end - a place where the exile, who could not accept his desires, breaks free and dances. It's a disco in his mind - and the song is Corona's "Rhythm of the Night." What an unexpectedly sweet finale to this searing paradox of a film.

CineScene, 2000