Beau Travail

Beau Travail is a 1999 French film directed by Claire Denis (a director well worth looking for) that is loosely based on Herman Melville's 1888 novella Billy Budd. It must've been too long since I last read Billy Budd, because I didn't see it. The story is set in Djibouti, where the protagonists are soldiers in the French Foreign Legion. Parts of the soundtrack of the movie are from Benjamin Britten's 1951 opera based on the novella. It's also been a long time since I last looked at the French Foreign Legion, but in case you were wondering... I don't qualify on a number of the requirements.

trailer:

The Guardian says,

Claire Denis’s film is a mesmeric, masculine ballet whose beauty and confident power, manifested in lugubrious scenes which suspend the normal rules of narrative procedure, simply go beyond conventional ideas of transgression or homoeroticism. She choreographs various exercises and drills for Galoup and his comrades to act out; some of these are normal workouts, but in a kind of hallucination or noonday mirage, they seem to become dance sequences and exotic tableaux. These happen either communally, or in a kind of one-on-one confrontation between Sentain and Galoup. They are juxtaposed with real dance sequences, at the Djibouti discotheques, where Galoup - though he actually has a girlfriend - makes it bitterly clear that it is only his connection to the Legion which has any emotional meaning for him.

But the “men” themselves are really just boys.

Criterion opens with this:

When Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999) first appeared on American screens, the critic Stephen Holden used a striking phrase to capture its embracing of bold opposites: “voluptuous austerity.” His characterization, widely quoted since, illuminates the film on many levels, and also forecasts something important about its reception to come. Quickly, Beau travail acquired a passionate following in film culture, was voted best film of the year in the Village Voice critics’ poll in 2000, when it had its U.S. theatrical run—only the first of many surveys on which it has featured prominently—and inspired an outpouring of writing in internet cinephile spaces, film magazines, and academic journals alike. This wide-ranging response, from disparate corners, perfectly suits this work that holds in balance a rich and resonant set of tensions and contrasts. ...

The power of Denis’s cinema flows from the fact that it fully addresses both mind and body: the whole spectator.

The British Film Institute closes by calling it "one of cinema’s most compelling and original meditations on the need for, and simultaneous resistance to, intimacy." 86% of Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it a positive review.

*******

I planted aster seed in the Spring, and here's the first bloom: