Good work = Beau travail [Widescreen]

Loosely based on Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd”, “Beau Travail” is set in the North African camp of the French Foreign Legion. A new recruit, Sentain (Gregoire Colin) arrives and his physical beauty enraptures the whole platoon including the commandant (Michel Subor). Only the Sergeant-Major, Galoup (Dennis Lavant), remains resistant to Sentain’s beauty, and his attempts to destroy the young recruit form the basis for the tragedy of this tale. But very much like an opera or a ballet, the narrative of this film is a thin pretext for a mesmerising spectacle that both celebrates the beauty of the male form while critically analysing the destructiveness of the rituals that attend masculinity; and just as these aggressive rituals assist in constricting men’s freedom in the world, Denis draws a parallel with the colonisation of Africa which the Foreign Legion represents. The stunning cinematography recalls the transcendant beauty of early cinema, while the imaginative music score (including excerpts of Benjamin Britten’s opera of “Billy Bud”) creates an eloquent aural equivalent to the ravishing strength of the images. We have for so long been used to the male gaze dominating the voyeuristic pleasures of film that Denis’ firm, sympathetic but critical feminine gaze is experienced as a revolutionary moment in screen history: it is as if we are seeing men and women anew - there is none of the objectifying dismemberment of the misogynist gaze; and women are not made absent as so often happens in the aesthetics of homoeroticism. “Beau Travail” is a film whose aesthetic achievements are matched by the lucid intelligence at work in its script and mise-en-scene. Almost wordlessly, we come to understand the enormity of the questions the film asks us about the connections between gender, sexuality and imperialism.