Beau Travail (2000)
Directed by Claire Denis
Foreign Legion officer Galoup recalls his once glorious life, training troops in the Gulf of Djibouti. His existence there was happy, strict and regimented, until the arrival of a promising young recruit, Sentain, plants the seeds of jealousy in Galoup's mind.
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What critics compared Beau Travail to
Cutting her hair and performing a radical act of impromptu auto-rhinoplasty, Alexia presents herself as a boy, then forms an increasingly perverse father-son bond with Vincent (Lindon), the troubled, body-pumping, steroid-shooting den daddy to a squadron of firefighters - whose all-male dance sessions suggest a flashier tribute to Claire Denis’s homoerotic images of the Foreign Legion in Beau Travail .
Nodding to Cronenberg and anime and Claire Denis (there’s “Beau Travail” in the many men-with-men dancing scenes, and there’s a little “High Life” fuckbox in the car-intercourse scenes) and “Holy Motors” and Nicolas Winding Refn (if he had the stones), “Titane” is bold in its reference points, no-holds-barred in its approach to some of the hottest-button issues of the day, and brash – and often very funny – in its deliciously grisly and inventive image-making.
Plus, a gaggle of bro-y firefighters let it all loose to some disco in the most rapturous dance scene since Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail.”
It may not be long before Titane is programmed as a double feature alongside Beau Travail.
It ends with a dance scene (another fucking Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) homage) and as the great climax of the film, I knew that people back home watching this at London Film Festival are going to be crying.
High Life seems to aspire to be a cosmic Beau Travail—her dreamlike 1999 adaptation of Billy Budd, set among French Foreign Legion soldiers training in the desert—but it is ultimately too capricious.
Denis is a filmmaker of the unspeakable, who uses her camera to communicate what cannot be said in words or at all: Trouble Every Day represented the carnivorous consequences of lust via cannibalism; Beau Travail let a frenzied nightclub dance routine speak for a man’s heartbreak and loneliness; and Let the Sunshine In translated Roland Barthes’s “figures” of a lover’s discourse into expressive performances and broken conversations.
And in a movie in which turning your head to look back acquires accrues a deeper, tragic meaning, it is a character-defining scene that thrums with the same spell-binding beauty of Denis Lavant’s last dance in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.
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We get a brief glimpse of Little dancing without a care in the world in what's surely a nod at "Beau Travail."
En un artículo reciente para Los Angeles Times, el cineasta Damien Chazelle enfatizaba el momento en que la emoción rebasa la lógica y el sentido del mundo, encontrando como único canal de salida una tonada que dirige un movimiento: baile y música, poniendo como uno de varios ejemplos el magistral final de Beau Travail, firmada por Claire Denis.
But Denis’ atmospherics, as usual, carry the day: Noir is a game of hard shadows and hard cases, but Denis (Beau Travail, Friday Night) and her team of regular collaborators—cinematographer Agnès Godard, many of the actors, and Tindersticks, who contribute an essential mood-building score—approach it with a seductive delicacy that’s both fitting for the genre and distinct from it.
Claire Denis is a remarkable director ( Beau Travail , The Intruder , White Material ), but in this case she has made an absorbing but pretentious puzzle out of a rather empty (yet nasty) set-up.
You can love films by Claire Denis – “Beau Travail” – or hate them – “Trouble Every Day” – or you can feel somewhere in the middle.
Claire Denis is a remarkable director ( Beau Travail , The Intruder , White Material ), but in this case she has made an absorbing but pretentious puzzle out of a rather empty (yet nasty) set-up.
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Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant, "Beau Travail") awakens and pushes through a wall adorned with prints of trees to find a cinema audience looking away from him, towards a screen.
The rubbery, indispensable Carax regular Denis Lavant (Beau Travail) plays Monsieur Oscar, a man whose job ?
He's formally dressed like a businessman, and one of his daughters calls from the roof: "Travaille bien" ("work hard"), a comic reference to Claire Denis's film Beau travail (aka Nice Work), a reshaping of Melville's Billy Budd set in the French Foreign Legion, in which Lavant played the Claggart figure.
Denis Lavant, the ugly/beautiful primal force of Les amants du Pont-Neuf and Beau Travail, is the committed actor, delivered from set to set in a long white limousine dressing room, the arts equivalent to the traveling office of Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (I think there is a great double feature to be found here).
Sometimes an inspired performance is enough: If you’re even remotely a fan of the pug-faced, irrepressibly physical Denis Lavant (a dazzling dancer in Beau Travail), then go ahead and add a few more stars.
Like a number of recent French movies, "Irréversible" pushes the edge of the sexual envelope, the difference being that unlike his gutsier contemporaries, directors Catherine Breillat ("Romance") and Claire Denis ("Beau Travail"), Noé isn't concerned with subverting the status quo.