Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Cast: Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Richard Courcet, Nicolas Devauchelle, Adiatou Massudi, Mickael Ravovski, Dan Herzberg, Giuseppe Molino, Gianfranco Poddighe, Marc Veh, Thong Duy Nguyen, Jean-Yves Vivet, Bernardo Montet, Dimitri Tsiapkinis, Djanel Zemali, Abdelkader Bouti. Screenplay: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, based on a novella by Herman Melville. Cinematography: Agnès Godard. Production design: Arnaud de Moleron. Film editing: Nelly Quettier. Music: Charles-Henri de Pierrefeu, Eran Zur. 

Claire Denis's Beau Travail doesn't really have much in common with Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991). Bigelow's film is pure pulp movie action thriller material, whereas Denis's is thoughtfully derived from a literary classic, Herman Melville's Billy Budd. But both films are directed by women with a keenly objective eye toward male display, the acting-out of testosterone-driven urges, a vision that gives these movies a special erotic charge. It might be worth bringing in a third film for consideration here: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982), a film made by a gay man that, like Denis's, also contains overtones of Billy Budd. But where Fassbinder's movie feels overheated, even campy, Denis's film, for all its intensity, has a coolness to it. I think that sometimes Denis, for all the scenes of barechested Legionnaires working out intensely, even intimately in the desert sun, is more restrained than she might be. The central conflict of her film, between Galoup (Denis Lavant), the movie's Claggart equivalent, and Sentain (Grégoire Colin), the Billy Budd of the movie, is fragmented in Denis's telling. All of the film's Legionnaires are handsome, so that Sentain doesn't stand out immediately from the group the way Melville's Billy does. The development of Galoup's jealous antipathy is subtly handled, mostly by casting the story as a flashback by Galoup after being court-martialed and expelled from the Legion -- this Claggart doesn't die. Neither, for that matter, does this Billy Budd, although he comes closer to it. But Beau Travail is still something like a great movie, maybe because Denis's avoidance of melodramatic excess and narrative hand-holding leaves it up to the viewer to draw inferences about motives and behavior. The film gets a great boost from Agnès Godard's hungry cinematography, a score that includes excerpts from another version of Billy Budd, Benjamin Britten's opera, and most especially from the Legionnaires' training routines, choreographed by Bernardo Montet.