There are many beautiful films, but few films that are about beauty. Beau travail is a film about beauty. You keep wonderingwhat beauty is: the swimming and marching men of the foreign legion, or the way that Claire Denis filmed them. As a contrast, there is just one face, that of Denis Lavant. He has a head that makes you gasp for breath. Sometimes the styling is so exaggerated that it makes you laugh. More often it manages to put you into a trance. Claire Denis treats the legion as a mythical army and as a harem; the surroundings of Djibouti are not land but landscape. There is no fighting, only practice. Denis borrowed the plot from Melville’s Billy Budd, as a result of which Beau travail is also about the old duality of beauty and goodness, that can only be separated from each other with much melancholy. With a handful of soldiers, Denis occasionally achieves what Riefenstahl did with hundreds of party members and athletes. Has the admiration for groups of bodies remained the same? People still appreciate many things that Hitler also found beautiful. Denis has made Beau travail with majestic ambiguity. Elements that co-operate in most films work against each other in this case. For instance, the sound says something different from the image. Sexuality is not a part of the plot, but an element that imbues all the images. According to Denis, film in general is both vulgar and exalted. If she were to film Snow White, she could turn it into a new masterpiece.(Bianca Stigter is film editor of NRC Handelsblad.)
