Beau Travail

Director: Claire Denis

1999

27 May 2025

See

Galoup (Denis Lavant) reminisces about his time in the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, and his jealousy of subordinate soldier Sentain (Gregoir Colin) whom everyone else loves.

Think

There’s no film like this about soldiers, Denis received no support from the Foreign Legion because they were worried it would come across as a gay story. She subverts the genre of war films by making it about a man seeing another man having all the qualities he covets. Is it homosexuality or homosociality? Or both? Or neither? It’s a loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor novela. Which itself is the story on board a ship about an officer executed for his unreasonable treatment of a sailor under his command. But here in this adaptation in the desert and by the sea, soldiers don’t have an enemy to fight. They’re purposeless and yet that lack of external conflict corrodes internally and abstractly says something significant about modern masculinity. Just like the title which translates as Good Work.

Feel

More than the differences between the tightly coiled and disciplined Galoup, and young and serenely beautiful Sentain is what unites them and the other Legionnaires. In Denis’s cinematic scenes of Bernando Montet’s choreography. IT shows rather than tells, to the score of Benjamin Britten’s opera of Billy Budd.

The Legionnaires sway like reeds in the wind and in training stretch balletically. Then there’s Lavant’s circus background athleticism in Galoup finally letting go and dancing to The Rhythm of the Night by Corona.