Beau Travail

A poetic retelling of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd which trades its 18th century British Navy setting for a modern day French Foreign Legion in the African desert.

Set among the blistering desert landscapes of the Gulf of Djibouti, a charismatic French foreign legion recruit comes under the watchful gaze of his superior commander (played with stoic intensity by the great Denis Lavant) whose growing obsession with the young man drives him to ruin.

Curator’s note
Claire Denis’s mesmerising rumination on honour, colonialism, masculinity and longing is a sensory delight, offering up one hypnotic image after another. Aided by cinematographer Agnès Godard’s carnal gaze and the rapturous use of Benjamin Britten’s operatic music, the film brings to the foreground the destructive nature of repression and desire unfulfilled. All of it accumulating into one of the most unforgettable and euphoric endings of all time.

Director Lynne Ramsay, like Claire Denis is a filmmaker who tells stories through lyrical imagery, fragmented moments and dreamlike passages of time that preserve the mystery of human behaviour and the unknowable forces that propels them towards triumph or destruction.