Beau travail (France: Claire Denis, 1999: 92 mins)
Denis’s loose retelling of Billy Budd, set among a troop of Foreign Legionnaires stationed in the Gulf of Djibouti, is one of her finest films, an elemental story of misplaced longing and frustrated desire. Beneath a scorching sun, shirtless young men exercise to the strains of Benjamin Britten, under the watchful eye of Denis Lavant’s officer Galoup, their ritualized movements simmering with barely suppressed violence. When a handsome recruit wins the favor of the regiment’s commander, cracks start to appear in Galoup’s fragile composure. In the tense, tightly disciplined atmosphere of military life, Denis found an ideal outlet for two career-long concerns: the quiet agony of repressing one’s emotions and the terror of finally letting loose. -- The Female Gaze (2018)
The power of Denis’s cinema flows from the fact that it fully addresses both mind and body: the whole spectator. Beau travail is, on the one hand, a cerebral film: its narrative is rigorously minimal, it features little expository dialogue, and its elegant ellipses sustain a state of mystery. But at the same time, it is a film with an audiovisual intensity that stirs the senses. It belongs to what Martine Beugnet calls a “cinema of sensation”—works that have a visceral, bodily effect on us. Denis and her longtime cinematographer, Agnès Godard, are masters of vivid and tactile image-making, capturing equally the elemental force of the sun-saturated East African landscape and the faces and bodies of the legionnaires in all their variety of race and ethnicity. - Girish Shambu (October 5, 2020)
Azevedo, Luis. "The Sensual World of Claire Denis." Little White Lies (April 15, 2019) ["Filtering the cinematic landscape of this master filmmaker through the five senses."]
Burchett, William, Brian Risselada and Josh Ryan. "Claire Denis." Syndrome and a Cinema #3 (October 17, 2011)
Chan, Andrew. "Men at Play: Beau Travail." Reverse Shot #29 (2009)
Cooper, Julia. "This Is the Rhythm of My Life: Failure in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail." cléo 1.3 (July 28, 2013)
Dooley, Kath. "Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis: Beau Travail (1999), 35 Rhums (2008) and White Material (2009)." Screening the Past #37 (September 2013)
Funderburg, Christopher, et al. "Claire Denis." Wrong Reel #122 (April 3, 2016)
Gee, Felicity. "Claire Denis." The Cinematologist #61 (April 19, 2018) ["The episode covers a range of topics including aesthetics and feminism, the canonisation of Beau Travail, as well as the new film and how it fits into her body of work. Music in the episode comes from some of the collaborations Denis has undertaken with the band Tindersticks."]
Goldsmith, Leo. "Claire Denis' Early Career." Reverse Shot (June 26, 2009)
Ogundare, Tope. "Male Love Through Female Eyes - Five films about men, each directed by a woman. What do we learn?" Keyframe (March 24, 2016)
Preziosi, Patrick. "“Why Don’t You Ever Take Me In Your Arms”: Claire Denis’ Cinema of Intimacy." Photogénie (November 16, 2018)
Sarmiento, José. "The Strangers of Claire Denis: Her cinema speaks of the borders that divide humanity, and the people who cross them." Keyframe (March 24, 2017)
Vicari, Justin. "Colonial fictions: Le Petit Soldat and its revisionist sequel, Beau Travail." Jump Cut #50 (2008)
Walton, Saige. "Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression by Martine Beugnet." Senses of Cinema #50 (April 2009) ["Those familiar with French director Claire Denis will be aware of the exquisite sensuality of her cinema. Whether coming together with another body in the world through the shared space and flesh of desire, or being driven apart from others by personal and sociopolitical circumstance, bodies – their gestures, bites and kisses, alternately languid or energetic movements, postures, habits and rituals – are the very “stuff” and substance of the film experience here. Given her privileging of the senses and her amenability to, as well as considered dialogue with, philosophers of the body, Denis is at the forefront of a number of contemporary directors (by no means exclusive to France, if we consider the work of figures such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, David Lynch or Wong Kar-Wai) who are generating much interest from sensually alert film scholars. Adrian Martin, for instance, identifies “the bedrock of Denis’ cinema [as] the flesh”, while Elena del Río comments that the “film body” of the cinema itself becomes a “sensation producing machine” in Denis, as if each film were “sending ripples of affect and thought across a diversity of its movements”, independent of the body of the viewer. The arresting materiality that infuses Denis forces us to look anew at sensory encounters with the cinema."]
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