"Serve the Good Cause and Die": A Review of Beau Travail
Claire Denis’s 1999 film, recently re-released in the Criterion Collection, builds and maintains its tension perfectly until the final shot.
Review by Tim Markatos
Every shot of Claire Denis’s 1999 film Beau Travail is a flex. There are of course the literal flexes, from the young, mostly shirtless, French foreign legionnaires, not a percentage point of body fat shared between them, who spend the movie running, jumping, swimming, marching, hustling, stretching, wrestling, dancing, and, most indelibly of all, ironing. But there are also the still, tensed shots of the beige-and-gray Djiboutian landscape, plains of rock and sand that stretch out parallel to the sea, punctuated by the occasional shot of city life when the legionnaires go into town to dance away the night at the club. The camera doesn’t show off with acrobatic movements; it doesn’t need to when the images, which the film’s cinematographer Agnès Godard describes as “primitive,” speak for themselves.
Beau Travail, recently restored and re-released in virtual cinemas and the Criterion Collection, is inspired by Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor, and makes inspired use of sound clips from Benjamin Britten and E. M. Forster’s opera from the same source. In the John Claggart role (more or less) is Galoup (Denis Lavant), an ex-sergeant of the French Foreign Legion who narrates the film from Marseille, where he has started journaling about the time he spent with the Legion in Djibouti, before his discharge. The Legion is life for the emotionally stoic, physically rigid Galoup. In one montage of training drills, he puts his philosophy into song: “What counts above all is discipline in the Legion / Loving one’s superior, obeying him / That’s the essence of our tradition.”
Both in Marseille in the present and in Djibouti in the past, Galoup is not given to much outward expression. Maybe it’s just a physiological problem: Relative to the younger bodies under his charge, Galoup’s body is fast becoming a site of decay. “My muscles are rusty,” he writes, “I’m eaten away by acid.” Yet even in the privacy of his own writing his thoughts are curt and meditative. “Maybe freedom begins with remorse,” he writes early in the film. You sense him turning the idea over in his mind as his memories of what precipitated his departure come together like a collage.
Galoup is martialed for his behavior and his ties to the institution he had tethered his life to are severed for good.
Galoup’s regrets primarily concern one of the last recruits he oversaw in the Legion, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin)—this story’s Billy Budd, if you want to stretch the Melville comparison. From the time he meets Gilles, Galoup senses that the kid doesn’t belong. “I felt something vague and menacing take hold of me,” Galoup remembers about their first encounter. From the way Denis shoots Galoup’s perspective, it’s clear that the something is some sort of repressed desire for the younger legionnaire, but Galoup himself never acknowledges it in as many words.
Motivated by envy and obsession, Galoup eventually disposes of Gilles by driving him out into the middle of the desert for a “find your way back to camp” exercise but stranding him there with a broken compass. Gilles is saved from wandering to his death when he is picked up by some Djiboutian locals—constant, quiet figures on the periphery of the film, reminders of the subjects who fall under French colonialism’s long shadow—who escort Gilles out of the story, his ultimate fate uncertain. Meanwhile, Galoup is martialed for his behavior and his ties to the institution he had tethered his life to are severed for good.
It’s a shocking narrative non sequitur, a perfect release of the tension so carefully sustained until now.
I hesitate to call Beau Travail hypnotizing only because nearly everyone who has written about it before me has already beat me there. But sometimes the shoe just fits. I watched it twice in one week and could easily watch it again right now. For a full ninety minutes, Denis maintains a trancelike rhythm that seems at first to mimic the rigidity of Galoup’s obedience to Legion tradition, until, almost imperceptibly, it begins to feel more like the persistence of his obsession with Gilles. Maybe it’s all just pointless bravado, you might begin to wonder—until the hypnotist snaps.
At the very end of the film, Galoup is at home in Marseille with nothing left to live for. “Serve the good cause and die,” he recites from a tattoo on his chest while lying in a crisply made bed with gun in hand, ready to make good on that motto. The camera tracks over to his arm, and as it comes to rest on a pulsating vein, the sound of Corona’s dance pop hit “Rhythm of the Night” quietly fades in from nowhere. Then, one final cut brings us back to the dance floor from earlier in the film.
Black-clad and chain-smoking, Galoup has the room all to himself. He saunters, he feints, he . . . twirls? He spins? He . . . jumps?! He jives! He boogies and woogies and shimmies and shakes and flounces and flails and rages and rolls and rolls and rolls right off screen. It’s a shocking narrative non sequitur, a perfect release of the tension so carefully sustained until now, and a psychologically devastating denouement to the story of a soul who gave so much of himself over to balletic self-discipline that he never learned to love to dance.
Tim Markatos is a designer and film critic in Washington, DC.
Beau Travail was originally released in 1999 and was re-released this year online, and in the Criterion Collection. You can find a copy on their website here.
