- DIRECTOR: CLAIRE DENIS
- STARRING: DENIS LAVANT, MICHEL SUBOR, GREGOIRE COLIN, MARTA TAFESSE KASSA
- FRANCE, 1999
- 91 MINS, RATING – 15
- DOORS – 7.00PM
- FILM – 7.30PM
Our Claire Denis season continues with the haunting military ballet Beau Travail: a confounding, wonderfully rich artistic statement of a movie – Claire Denis’ critical breakthrough.
Foreign Legion officer, Galoup, recalls his once glorious life, leading troops in the Gulf of Djibouti. His existence there was happy, strict and regimented, but the arrival of a promising young recruit, Sentain, plants the seeds of jealousy in Galoup's mind. He feels compelled to stop him from coming to the attention of the commandant who he admires, but who ignores him. Ultimately, his jealousy leads to the destruction of both Sentain and himself.
“At its close, Beau Travail is still inviting us to guess – to feel rather than learn the rhythms of its storytelling. It’s this audacious looseness, this elegant unfixability, that keeps Denis’s ‘beautiful work’ so fresh – and asserts it as one of cinema’s most compelling and original meditations on the need for, and simultaneous resistance to, intimacy.”
“Extraordinary… prepare to be blown away”
“What is really remarkable about Denis’s film is the way she succeeds in fusing the real and the dreamlike, the naturalistic and the figurative, into one visual conceit. Never for one moment does this shimmering, simmering emotional desert storm of a film relax its grip on your senses.”