Beau travail (1999, Claire Denis)
Monday 15th of July, 7pm in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema
Join us on Monday the 15th of July from 7pm (film starts at 7:15pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema for a screening of Claire Denis’ Beau travail (1999). The film is 1 hour 32 minutes long so the screening will be finished by 8:50 pm.
A tone poem of masculinity, homoeroticism, sensuality and repressed desire, Beau travail explores the unraveling of Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) of the French Foreign Legion as he gradually grows obsessively jealous of the young and beautiful legionnaire Sentain (Gregoire Colin). Set in Djibouti, the film wrestles with themes of colonialism and non-belonging, while exploring the rigid masculinity of the Foreign Legion through its hypnotic, rhythmic montages and sensually captured military rituals. The film is loosely based on Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, and its soundtrack contains extracts from Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of the same work.
From Girish Shambu’s essay for the Criterion Collection:
The power of Denis’s cinema flows from the fact that it fully addresses both mind and body: the whole spectator. Beau travail is, on the one hand, a cerebral film: its narrative is rigorously minimal, it features little expository dialogue, and its elegant ellipses sustain a state of mystery. But at the same time, it is a film with an audiovisual intensity that stirs the senses. It belongs to what Martine Beugnet calls a “cinema of sensation”—works that have a visceral, bodily effect on us. Denis and her longtime cinematographer, Agnès Godard, are masters of vivid and tactile image-making, capturing equally the elemental force of the sun-saturated East African landscape and the faces and bodies of the legionnaires in all their variety of race and ethnicity.
To further explore Claire Denis’ filmography, read Elena Lazic’s guide for the BFI.