BEAU TRAVAIL (1999)

The French Foreign Legionnaires serving on a sea of sand in sun-baked Djibouti, might well be Calvin Klein underwear models in writer/director Claire Denis’s moody/much-acclaimed homoerotic memory piece.  (Its critical rep only rising over the years.)  As for what it’s about, as much as anything, it's BILLY BUDD-lite, refracting on Herman Melville’s novella about ‘impressed’ seaman Budd, a charismatic Holy Fool type who acts as catalyst to good & evil on a British war ship; here presented as if we're voyeurs at the shooting of a photo layout for some vaguely threatening oversized ‘living’ fashion magazine.  No one dies in this contemporary take, but Denis tags it with bits of Benjamin Britten’s BILLY BUDD opera on the soundtrack so we can’t miss the connection.  (Naturally, she avoids an Officers’ Ensemble where they sing ‘Don’t like the French!’ as they wait for an encounter that never comes.)  Grégoire Colin is new recruit Gilles Sentain, the Billy Budd blank force of grace; Denis Lavant is Galoup, implacable villain Claggart in the Melville.  The rest only tangentially mirroring the book, and with far lower stakes (no murder; no hanging), all fashionable rather than dramatic even when charting near death on a salt reservoir or when it ends with the most unlikely bit of break-dancing e’er caught on film.  At heart, it’s Paris Vogue Hommes, and just as easy to pick up or put down at any page it happens to open to.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Compare to BILLY BUDD/’62, Peter Ustinov’s unexpectedly fine try at the Melville original.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/billy-budd-1962.html