Screened as part of NZIFF 2021

Beau Travail 1999

Directed by Claire Denis Bill Gosden Tribute

We open the Bill Gosden Tribute programme with one of Bill’s favourite films. A fan of Claire Denis since her feature debut, Chocolat, Bill programmed nearly every one of the auteur’s films during his time as Festival Director – even the hardest-to-see ones (U.S. Go Home NZIFF 1995) – at the exact moment when Chirac’s announcement to resume nuclear testing in the Pacific made anything French strictly démodé.

Beau Travail was widely considered the masterpiece of the festival circuit when it screened here in 2000. Bill called it a “visual sensation” and “unmistakably a film about men by a woman”. This digital restoration lends new crispness and intensity to not only one of the great films of the 1990s, but one of the greatest endings in all of cinema.

Nov 06

Embassy Theatre

Nov 09

Embassy Theatre

France In French with English subtitles
93 minutes DCP

Director

Cast

Denis Lavant
,
Michel Subor
,
Grégoire Colin
,
Richard Courcet

Producer

Patrick Grandperret

Screenplay

Claire Denis
,
Jean-Pol Fargeau

Cinematography

Agnès Godard

Editor

Nelly Quettier

Music

Charles Henri de Pierrefeu
,
Eran Zur

Festivals

Venice, Toronto, New York 1999; Sundance, Berlin, Auckland, Wellington 2000

Elsewhere

Celebrating 50 years of the film festival in Wellington

50th logo

French filmmaker Claire Denis is the striking exception to the rule that women rarely make movies that fix their gaze upon the tantalising otherness of men. Her mesmerising Beau Travail transposes Melville’s Billy Budd to a French Foreign Legion troop stationed in a harsh and beautiful port town of Djibouti.

Abetted by the dazzling cinematography of Agnes Godard, Denis finds harmony, exhilaration and mystery in the rituals and the esprit de corps of army life. Her vision is rendered all the sharper by identification with a character who feels excluded from the physical perfection that surrounds him. — Bill Gosden

“Stark and stylised, it’s a semi-verite, semi-ballet fantasia, as well as an adaptation of two versions of Billy Budd – Herman Melville’s original story and Benjamin Britten’s opera, used on the soundtrack. In Marseilles, recently court-martialled soldier Galoup (Denis Lavant) remembers his days as sergeant in a legion outpost in Djibouti. Denis adopts the Billy Budd story wholesale – the ugly sergeant is threatened by a beautiful young recruit who appears to usurp his credit with the commanding officer, and so the sergeant plots the younger man’s downfall. The film choreographs – literally – the homo-erotic tensions of legion life. The corps exercises first resemble a mass of moving statues under the desert sun, then a bizarre ritual dance, as the men hurl themselves at each other to the thud of grunts and slapping chests, at once murderous and amorous. The film makes its effect felt with a minimum of dialogue because the movements, starkly photographed in desert settings by Agnes Godard, say it all.” — Jonathan Romney, The Guardian