Beau Travail [VHS] [1999]

Description

Product Description Director Claire Denis' intensely physical study of tensions within a platoon of legionnaires stationed in North Africa. Fearing for his position within the group, Sergeant-Major Galoup (Denis Lavant) is growing increasingly jealous of the popular new recruit Sentain (Grégoire Colin) and decides to bring about his downfall. Eventually, when the platoon have left on a series of exercises, Galoup manages to provoke Sentain into a direct confrontation, the two of them coming face-to-face for the last time in an incredible sequence set against the harsh, rocky coastal landscape and the music of Benjamin Britten's 'Billy Budd'. .co.uk Review One of the very finest French films released in 2000, Claire Denis' resetting of Billy Budd among modern-day French Foreign Legionnaires welds near-experimental formal minimalism with a savage exposure of male aggression, jealousy and repressed homosexual desire, all set in an eye-peeling desert setting and choreographed to the grunts of men at work. Ravaged-featured Denis Lavant plays Galoup, who narrates his story in flashback, perhaps at the moment before his life ends. A sergeant in charge of a troop of Legionnaires, Galoup's position as the favourite of the Commander (Michel Subor) is threatened by the arrival of pretty-boy Sentain (Grégoire Colin, who played the spoiled wastrel in The Dream Life of Angels). Galloup plots to discredit his rival. As the drama unfolds through indirection and Galloup's unreliable disclosures, Denis dwells lovingly on the ballet of men at work as the soldiers run through their obstacle courses, practice combat pas de deux and disport like lean, khaki-clad dolphins by the Mediterranean shore. Sort of like Full Metal Jacket meets early Derek Jarman. It's a sensuous and exquisite film, as perceptive about relationships between men as it is about those between colonisers and the colonised. --Leslie Felperin