beau travail (1999)

I've recently watched Claire Denis's beautiful Beau Travail for the third time (this time on DVD) during the long weekend. Here is an edited version of what I wrote about it exactly three years ago:

The weirdest thing happened at the theatres, just before Beau Travail screened, when this middle-aged patron demanded to find out from the ushers why so few people were in attendance. (I counted about nine of us, which was a reasonable enough audience I suppose for such niche fare. I’m always infatuated with the emptiest picture houses anyway. Very Goodbye Dragon Inn.) It was a strangely profound moment, but whatever.

That evening in February 2007 was actually my second viewing of Claire Denis’ film (first caught it in 2000) and this French filmmaker’s brooding, obsessive work still retain that strange effect on me as in the first time round – it's a film still capable of fucking up my mood for days on end like few could. It’s like these mysterious objects at play in Beau Travail have hid out in the deepest and most remote outskirts of my consciousness for several years, only to return as these deep-dark dream sequences soaked in brine.

Denis seems to be building her story of an emotionally remote soldier’s personal reflections, which borders on suicidal remorse, more from her own life experience living in postcolonial Africa and only vaguely from the Herman Melville story that the film was supposed to be based on. Her regular cinematographer Agnès Godard (who also shot Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire), always have an unerring eye for the most ridiculously sublime images. How do you erase from your mind these scenes of haunted legionnaires ghost-trawling through a ghetto dawn, bare male bodies going through lavishly choreographed calisthenics routines under the sun, or that final shot of lead actor Denis Lavant gyrating wildly to the excruciating Corona dance-hit “Rhythm of the Night”?