Almost midway through watching Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, my mother asked me to help her cut her hair, which I did dutifully, not before inspecting the new linen on the carpet of our living room. The movie had put me in a reflective mood, and made me think about how much our lives can be like films. How our dialogue, curt and unintentional, can be molded into moments of clarity and intention. The artful take of me cutting her hair would be akin to the beautifully rendered images of Denis’ 1999 film, based loosely on a novella by Herman Melville.
In the film, sixteen officers are stationed in the arid, desolate landscape of Djibouti, rocky terrain surrounded by blue, clairvoyant water. A sergeant, Galoup, develops an obsession with another officer, Sentain, who is a young newly-arrived legionnaire. Galoup tries to stymie Sentain’s success to impress the commanding officer who takes an interest in Sentain but pays little attention to Galoup. In between the shots of hardened masculinity set against the impossible backdrop, there are delicate moments of feminine care work and domesticity among the men. (The men iron their uniforms; a man hangs up washed undergarments waving in the wind.)
The film begins and ends with dancing; in the beginning it takes place in the physical, consumable world, and in the end it is unclear whether it is in an afterlife, a dream or a vision. Denis prioritizes physicality above all else in Beau Travail, showing the sinews of soldiers’ muscles while they perform their daily exercises as she does women’s shapely forms while dancing. She feminizes and elegizes the men in long takes of their faces, with an opera-like soundtrack in the background. She establishes and undermines the idea of empire, French colonial power, that is set up to malign a country’s inhabitants.
When Galoup first sees Sentain, he describes him as thin and not fitting of being an officer. “I felt something vague and menacing take hold of me,” he says. On the other hand, he admires his commandant “without knowing why,” and admits the man never confided in him or cared about him. Galoup says he feels a rage brimming inside him, a jealousy that cannot be contained. Later on, when the commander asks Sentain if he gets along with his parents, he reveals that he was found in a staircase. The commander responds that at least it’s a ‘belle trouvée,” a parallel with “beau travail.”
The film is an exercise in labour, or its equivalent in yearning, whether it is for a dance, for a man, or for home. The camp is set up in an arid plateau with children and their parents watching. It seems as though there is no need for it, and its reason for existing does not come into the picture. Yet there is a particular need, or want, in each hoist of the body, each swim, each thrust of the arm. In the end, the tragic fate of Sentain is caused by an overreaction, another brimming of rage, by Galoup, who knocks a canteen of water out of his hands while Sentain tries to aid a fellow soldier. The soldier is being punished for abandoning his post, resigned to digging in the hard, rocky ground, a hole of unknown depth.
Beau Travail begins with the writing of a memoir, a hapless if not overused device, to describe events in the past tense, from a point of view that is already withered, less accurate and reliable. Movies that begin with the act of remembering include Persepolis (2007), a coming of age story of a girl in the midst of the Iranian revolution, and An Education (2009), the memoir of a girl who is seduced by an older man, and Forrest Gump (1994), in whose recollection there lie many hilarious outtakes and revivals of pop culture. Denis’ film, with its wistful logic, makes for Sunday night viewing, a night balanced on the edge of morning, in the dance halls of someone’s basement or in the mind’s eye.