Beau Travail
by
MOVIE CATEGORY
The Foreign Legion stationed in the Djibouti Gulf in Africa follows an everyday life regulated by exercises, barracks obligations and leisure evenings. The young soldiers are trained by officer Galoup, the silent and cautious ruler of the military activities. But when cadet Sentain joins the Legion, galoup sees his perfect world fall apart. Is it out of jealousy or out of uncontrollable attraction?
Claire Denis combines her usual thoughts on Western colonialism in the Third World with heated and feverish reflections on the body and the landscape, in this revisitation of macho camaraderie which is a classic of contemporary cinema. In an indistinct geography of coasts and deserts, the soldiers, and in particular Galoup, observe the illusory boundaries of the military order crumbling, collapsed like the certainties of their objectives and the meaning of their being there, and perhaps more broadly of their being alive in the world.
DIRECTORY
She was born in Paris in 1948 and lived in Africa until 1961. She graduated in cinema from IDHEC, the French film school, in 1972, and had the opportunity to assist directors such as Jacques Rivette, Andrej Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders. Her cinema will address issues such as colonialism since her early works such as Chocolat (1988) and S’en fout la mort (1990), but her films will focus on more carnal and suggestive investigations of desire with the classics Beau Travail (1999) and Trouble Every Day (2001). Her movies travel around the world, from Cannes with Chocolat to Berlin (with Beau Travail and Avec amour et acharnement in 2022), from Locarno (where she won the Pardo d’Oro with Nénette et Boni in 1996) to Venice (with Vendredi soir in 2002). Her latest film, Stars at Noon (2022), was awarded the Special Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival Jury.