Beau travail

...when he enters the girls' locker room in CARRIE, it only stands to reason that women should be given equal movie time to fetishize, right? The director Claire Denis has fantastic technique, and at the beginning of this adaptation of BILLY BUDD (loose, loose adaptation) she pans around a platoon of French Foreign Legionnaires doing an imaginary variant on tai chi in the baking sun of East Africa. On the soundtrack is a clangorous choral chant from Britten's "Billy Budd." Closeshaven, blockish heads, rolling shoulder muscles, shirtless nips are given reverent, but somehow remote, attention. The contrast between the world of no women (guys scuttling underneath barbed wire on manoeuvres) and the world of lotsa women (discos where the men stand around gyrating African ladies) is so severe it's like something out of KOYAANISQATSI. Indeed, much of this film has a Godfrey Reggio-ish, misterioso, listen-to-the-riddles-of-God quality. The reviews suggest that this is a "study of masculinity"--I guess because critics don't know what else to do with a movie that's all about a bunch of guys in fatigues in the middle of nowhere. But as with all philosophers of sexuality, from Genet to Dennis Cooper, the emphasis is on the limits of being human. Denis touches on that here--especially at the end, when an act of violence is rhymed with an act of...profoundly goofy dance.

Much of BEAU TRAVAIL registers with the audience (even the appreciative, culture-vulture audience I saw it with) as ridiculous, boring and repetitive to the point of risible. Where an artist like Dario Argento bangs his sexual quirks on the table like Stanley Kowalski breaking the good china in his kitchen, Denis elevates them to the level of metaphysical mystery. The forces that generate aggression, murder and self-destruction in Melville's story are as freakish and unknowable here as a toxic chemical accident. For Denis, these warrish men are as hard and unknowable as the cracked, Encantadas-like landscape surrounding them. BEAU TRAVAIL is not always unalloyed pure pleasure. But it is at no moment less than the work of an honest artist.