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"Beau Travail"
Claire Denis' baffling and exhilarating "Billy Budd" smolders with heat-blasted rhythms and supercharged acting.

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By Charles Taylor

March 31, 2000 |   Perhaps better than any other current French filmmaker, Claire Denis has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary France. Watching her "I Can't Sleep" or "Nénette et Boni" was like seeing an updated version of the portraits of street life and working-class life from French films of the '30s, only minus the romantic fatalism.

Denis' movies reveal communities that exist like little villages within the pockets of bigger cities, except that in these villages not everyone speaks the same language. You could argue that one of the reasons Denis has been so good on the experience of immigrants, particularly black and Arab immigrants, is that, having spent her childhood in Africa as the daughter of a civil servant (she was born in Paris), she herself grew up as an outsider. Denis understands that outsiders make waves just by their presence. Part of the unspoken atmosphere of her films has been France's high unemployment rate and the resulting anti-immigrant policies of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the far right.

Beau Travail Directed by Claire Denis Starring Denis Levant, Grégoire Colin and Michel Subor

Her remarkable new film, "Beau Travail" ("Good Work"), is about the waves made by a newcomer in a society of outsiders who have created their own world. This loose adaptation of Herman Melville's "Billy Budd" is set among the French Foreign Legion in the East African outpost of Djibouti, a place as removed and self-contained as the ship in Melville's story, the Bellipotent.

Denis has never shied away from tackling characters of a different race or sex. But the closed-off world of the legionnaires is a constant reminder that, as both civilians and women, she and her cinematographer, Agnès Godard, are outsiders. So they've chosen to regard the legionnaires from a mesmerized distance. Denis is reluctant to impose interpretations of motives or psychology, and the result can seem opaque, even insistently undramatic. But the formalism of the film's surface disguises what's actually an exploratory approach.

Denis and Godard have placed their faith in the ability of observation to reveal. For long stretches, "Beau Travail" is nearly silent as the camera just watches the men going through their daily routines. That silence seems at first a perverse way of adapting the thicket of words that is "Billy Budd." Novelists and literary critics often complain that movies of great books reduce them to plot, leaving out the layers of meanings. But the best literary adaptations often find those meanings by adhering to the plot, or by capturing the essence of characters in the look of the actors who portray them.

When we see Finlay Currie as escaped convict Magwich, bolting the meal the young Pip has smuggled to him, in David Lean's film of "Great Expectations," it's likely that Charles Dickens' description of the scene ("more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent manner, than a man who was eating it") reverberates in our heads. Staff sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant) in "Beau Travail" does not take the place of Claggart, the master-at-arms in Melville's story, nor does new recruit Sentain (Gregoire Colin) replace the image of angelic young sailor Billy Budd. (The Captain Vere figure, played by Michel Subor, does, however, suggest much of that character's weird ambiguity of power.) But Denis' film links up with Melville in unexpected ways.

Incredibly, Denis has attempted to film the story not by sticking to the narrative but by attempting, via images, to be as ruminative as possible. As I read "Billy Budd" (and in honesty I have to say that I find Melville perhaps the most difficult writer I've ever encountered), it's less a story than an argument about the mysterious nature of goodness. Beneath the surface simplicity of the confrontation between the good represented by Billy and the evil represented by his infatuated tormentor, Claggart, Melville struggles to encapsulate something that resists explanation. I kept getting tangled in Melville's tortured and deliberate syntax, his venturing down bypaths that hold "an enticement not readily to be withstood." He works toward summations and then, as if fearing that he has reduced what he meant to say by leaving out some crucial shading, hesitates, and sets off down another bypath. He is so scrupulous about not reducing his story, and so preoccupied with anything that might, that at times it's as if he leaves his story behind altogether.

There are obvious pitfalls for a filmmaker who tries to be true to a writer's thought processes rather than his narrative. What we accept on the page as symbolic or fabular can seem vague when given the concreteness movies confer on everything. In "Beau Travail" Galoup tells us that the men have fallen under Sentain's spell, though we don't see it happening. Denis means us to accept it just as Melville does, and the film can be as maddening to watch as "Billy Budd" is to read. The deliberate, hypnotic pace, Denis' attempt to capture both the disciplined rhythms of the Foreign Legion's routine and the slightly drugged pace of life under the African sun, is at times merely monotonous.

In thinking about it afterward, "Beau Travail" seems more successful conceptually than dramatically. Sentain sets off a poisonous resentment within Galoup, but there's no sense that Galoup is in love with him as Claggart is in love with Billy. It's not dramatically satisfying that Denis and Godard remain so insistently on the surface of these men and their lives. It deprives us of the understanding we want to have of movie characters. But it suits the essence of the Foreign Legion, a place where men escaping some personal or legal entanglement can, literally, leave their life behind and take on a new identity. (Apparently, Legionnaires are given the option of selecting a new identity every five years.)

This is Denis' equivalent of what Melville meant by the "circumstances which in the dearth of exact knowledge as to ... true antecedents opened to the invidious a vague field for unfavorable surmise." At one point, Galoup attempts to stop a legionnaire from aiding a fellow African who is being punished by telling him, "You're not African anymore. You're a legionnaire now." And it's perhaps an inside joke that Subor's commander has been given the same name, Bruno Forestier, as the character Subor played in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 "Le Petit Soldat." This is a place where men can be anyone they choose, and there's no telling how many tough guys would choose an identity from the movies that have fed their fantasies.

Next page | The rigid fetishism of order, right on the edge of chaos