Wow! Such a good movie.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

A Masterpiece!

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Now I did it. My overblown ratings of other films by other directors make it impossible to properly rank the films of Claire Denis on any kind of rational scale. I've given Hollywood films a "ten" rating. By that standard, Denis makes films where the ratings should range from twelve to twenty. I'll give "Beau Travail" a rating of 18 (not twenty--I don't want to make the same mistake again and paint myself into another corner).It is simply not possible to explain how this genius has transformed my view of cinema. There is no pretense here. I am amazed at nearly every scene in a kind of collage of images and sounds. Denis takes the "military life" and turns it on its own homophobic head and produces the work of art. Viola! It's so far outside of our daily experience that it mirrors, not daily life, but that daily mental circus we call our minds. Claire Denis is like a U.S. major league pitcher throwing heat. You can either hit major league pitching or you can't. You either get this "type" of film or you don't.(But with time and maturity I think that anyone can come to understand this greatest of this generation's filmmakers. So don't despair if you are twenty-something horrified at what appears to be pretentious nonsense. Wait a while. With time comes understanding.) The characters in "Beau Travail" are in the French Foreign Legion but they are also representative of all soldiers. They are intensely motivated by hormonal secretions and cultural institutions. They are thrown into the winds of internal fires and drowned out by external tsunamis. They are young and dumb and believe they are immortal, and by golly, they seem to be just that. The conflicts that arise often seem petty and putrid when viewed from without, but from within these same conflicts fairly glow with the heat of pride and glory. No "psychological" analysis can reveal the essence of such conflict. No "homoerotic" projections can drain the sap from this tree of life.To be a soldier is transcendent. To be a failure as a soldier is to be thrown back into the ordinary world, and in some ways to fail at existence itself. It's not about "morality" but it is about truth and courage and honor and the real essence of what motivates us all. Dreams, not reality, are what we will remember when we cross over into the afterlife. Here, at the end of ordinary thought, we begin our journey into the mind of one individual and the daily, moment-by-moment living of life that he is loath to do. Man confronted by the pale and washed-out image, that is supposed to the here and now, but is only the after-image of life.I viewed this film without subtitles in the French language and I don't speak much French. It's not a movie about "blah blah." Let your third eye drink it in. Stop filtering what you hear and see. Free your mind.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die is a book that has given me many titles I would never heard of or seen before reading it, and this French film is another of those films inside that I was looking forward to trying. Basically ex-Foreign Legion master sergeant officer Galoup (Denis Lavant) is reminiscing about his time leading his men, under the direction of Commander Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), in the desert, mostly supervising the psychical exercise and other routine duties. The troop is one day joined by good looking, socially skilled and bold Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), who Galoup becomes malicious of, there are suggestions of possible homosexual feelings awakened as well. There is a point when Sentain disobeys his orders to save another soldier, and there is a chance to destroy him for the master sergeant, so he punishes him sticking him in the middle of the desert and forced to walk back to base. Galoup makes this impossible for him with the lack of drinking water and a broken compass, so Sentain looks doomed to suffer exhaustion and dehydration, but he is found and rescued on the salt flats by a group of Djiboutis. In the end Galoup is given a court martial, his time ended in the Foreign Legion and sent back to France, and he is supposedly going to commit suicide, but the ending seems to be an all over the place interpretive dance. The acting is as good as you can get, especially good is Lavant, I may not have understood the full story, but I was engaged by many moments of the film, such as the fantastic disco scenes with great soundtrack, like the French dub of Holly Valance's "Kiss Kiss" (or "Simarik") and of course the final dance to Corona's "Rhythm Of The Night", and the exercise training and desert walk scenes stand out, overall it is an intriguing psychological drama. Very good!

Every so often a movie comes out that conflicts me, and these are the movies that take me quite a while to analyze. Sometimes it will take a second view to see if I missed some vital element, or it will dawn on me later, and thus I will have grasped what it was that at the moment seemed rather inconsequential. BEAU TRAVAIL, Claire Denis' 1999 film, is one of these movies. It is an adaptation of Herman Melville's "Billy Budd" -- although adaptation should be expressed in a loose term. It tells the story of an army troop stationed at Djibouti, training endlessly under the firm hand of a nearly expressionless Denis Lavant, himself a training machine, and the arrival of a young soldier played by the very beautiful Gregoire Colin who becomes the catalyst that triggers a response from Lavant. Colin, as Sentain, is the young rookie everyone loves and admires; he has great beauty and is the epitome of masculinity. This ticks Lavant's Galoup to approach Sentain at an oblique angle, and a scene in which both men face off resembles that of two lions about to attack and is a sequence of immense beauty because you see the hardened expression on Lavant's leonine face pitted against Colin's frightened yet set facade. This is what cinema is supposed to do: tell a story without too much dialogue, maybe a voice-over here or there as BEAU TRAVAIL does, and then get to its denouement, which in this movie is made more ironic than tragic. Where it falters a little is in its portentous score with a male chorus which is lifted from the opera version: it's too intrusive and is reminiscent of the score used for 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but there it had a purpose; here, I didn't see it. Frequent incursions into dance music also distract a little from the meat of the story. What I do admire is Denis' approach to the material. In bringing a strong homoerotic element to the scene, she also manages to do what few gay directors have done: create a visually mesmerizing work of art where male passion is expressed through what is appropriate of the gender: physical activity. It's what I've always wanted to see: an aggressive ballet of masculine energy which unfolds a deceptively simple story of attraction, repulsion, and envy. Highly recommended.

... but I guess I'd like it like other very personal Claire Denis movies. Mauvais Sang from Leos Carax and with Denis Lavant is also a personal favorite and I've seen it quoted somewhere. Just because a movie is stylish doesn't mean it's bad. Unstylish movies? Lots of them... Claire Denis succeeds in creating a very personal climax that makes for movies to be remembered long after you've seen them. Beau Travail would translate literally as "Beautiful Work" but I think the best translation would be "Nice Job" as in "You did a nice job, here". With the ambiguity of job meaning both work and occupation. I don't think "Good Work" is a proper translation like I've seen here and there.