Beau Travail (Denis, 1999): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm
This movie, which is introduced by Catherine Wheatley, Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, is part of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll season. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
A
gorgeous mirage of a movie (1999), Claire Denis' reverie about the
French foreign legion in eastern Africa, suggested by Herman Melville's
Billy Budd, Foretopman, benefits especially from having been
choreographed (by Bernardo Montet, who also plays one of the
legionnaires). Combined with Denis' superb eye for settings, Agnes
Godard's cinematography, and the director's decision to treat major and
minor elements as equally important, this turns some of the military
maneuvers and exercises into thrilling pieces of filmmaking that surpass
even Full Metal Jacket and converts some sequences in a disco into
vibrant punctuations. The story, which drifts by in memory fragments, is
told from the perspective of a solitary former sergeant (Denis Lavant,
star of The Lovers on the Bridge) now living in Marseilles and recalling
his hatred for a popular recruit (Gregoire Colin) that led to the
sergeant's discharge; the fact that his superior is named after the hero
of Jean-Luc Godard's Le petit soldat and played by the same actor
almost 40 years later (Michel Subor) adds a suggestive thread, as do the
passages from Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. Most of all, Denis,
who spent part of her childhood in Djibouti, captures the poetry and
atmosphere—and, more subtly, the women—of Africa like few filmmakers
before her. A masterpiece.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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