French Foreign Legion officer Galoup loves his tough, strictly regimented life of leading troops in the Gulf of Djibouti . . . at least until that pesky new recruit Sentain comes along and ruins everything. Jealousy and obsession take over and things don’t end well in this absolute barn-burner of a movie by the great Claire Denis, which both celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and takes its place as one of the finest films in that span.
With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Ranked as the 7th greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, Beau Travail is Denis’ desert vision of desire and despair, brotherhood and otherhood.
Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian sure liked it, calling it “a mesmeric, masculine ballet whose beauty and confident power . . . simply go beyond conventional ideas of transgression or homoeroticism . . . What is really remarkable is the way she succeeds in fusing the real and the dreamlike, the naturalistic and the figurative, into one visual conceit. Never for one moment does this shimmering, simmering emotional desert storm of a film relax its grip on your senses.”
If you haven’t seen it before, treat yourself.