Normal:Beau Travail
dir.: Claire Denis
NR, 90 min.
Opening Friday at the Belcourt Theatre
Claire Denis is a sensational filmmaker—with all that implies. Her Beau Travail, opening this week at the Belcourt in Hillsboro Village, is a movie so tactile in its cinematography, inventive in its camera placement, and sensuous in its editing that the purposefully oblique and languid narrative is all but eclipsed.
“I’ve found an idea for a novel,” a Godard character once announced. “Not to write the life of a man, but only life, life itself. What there is between people, space...sound and colors.” His words might serve as Denis’ manifesto. Her transposition of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd to a French Foreign Legion post on the Horn of Africa is a mosaic of pulverized shards. Every cut in Beau Travail is a small, gorgeously explosive shock.
Denis’ main principle is kinesthetic immersion. A former French colonial who spent part of her childhood in Djibouti, she introduces her material with a pan along a crumbling wall mural, accompanied by the legionnaire anthem; this is followed by close-ups of the soldiers dancing with their sultry African dream girls—a vision of sexual glory accentuated by the flashing Christmas lights that constitute the minimalist disco decor—and then by images of the shirtless recruits exercising in the heat of the day to excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd oratorio.
The filmmaker’s style is naturally hieroglyphic. There is little dialogue, and although Beau Travail feels present-tense, it is actually an extended first-person flashback. Denis puts her version of the Melville tale of the “handsome sailor” martyred by an evil superior in the villain’s mouth. The movie is narrated by the ex-sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), after he has been expelled from the Legion for his mistreatment of the popular and gung-ho recruit Sentain (Grégorie Colin). Short and bandy-legged, with odd aquatic features and a face like a Tom Waits song, Lavant’s Galoup is a figure of pathos. The Legion, if not the legionnaire, he loved is lost to him.
Time drifts, memories flicker. Beau Travail is the recollection of elemental pleasure. The recruits drill under the sun or scramble around the empty fort, when they are not skin-diving or performing tai chi. The heat, the disco, the golden beaches, and the turquoise sea suggest a weird sort of Club Med. Apparently crucial to their basic training is the ability to iron a perfect uniform crease. Forestier (Michel Subor), the commanding officer, is fond of chewing the local narcotic, qat. “If it wasn’t for fornication and blood we wouldn’t be here,” he tells someone.
Sentain rescues a downed helicopter pilot and Forestier takes a liking to him, further feeding Galoup’s jealousy. The sergeant orchestrates a situation to destroy Sentain, bringing the recruits to a barren strip of the coast for some character-building convict work, digging a purposeless road or doing their exercises at high noon. (The locals impassively watch these peculiar antics, modernistic hug-fests that might have been choreographed by Martha Graham.) The movie turns wildly homoerotic. Egged on by Galoup, and Britten’s incantatory music, these legionnaires are exalted in their minds. Finally, but without overt cause, Galoup and Sentain stage a one-on-one bare-chested face-off, circling each other on a rocky coast with Britten’s oratorio soaring.
In its hypnotic ritual, Beau Travail suggests a John Ford cavalry Western interpreted by Marguerite Duras—Galoup always has time to scribble his obsessions in a diary. As in Billy Budd, the sergeant suckers the enlisted man into the fatal mistake of slugging him. (Typically, the filmmaker handles this crucial incident in four quick shots.) But, unlike Melville, Denis has no particular interest in Christian allegory. She distills Melville’s story to its existential essence. A final visit to the disco finds Galoup flailing out against the prison of self, dancing alone to the Europop rhythm of the night.
Like Denis’ previous films, I Can’t Sleep and Nénette and Boni, her latest is a mysterious mix of artful deliberation and documentary spontaneity. To watch it is to wonder about the process. Are her often elaborate shots generated by the scenes she’s set up? Does she find her structure in the editing room? One thing’s for sure: Along with her regular cinematographer, Agnes Godard, Denis always opts for beauty. Beau Travail indeed.
—J. Hoberman
Mannish boy
The premise of Chuck & Buck, written by Mike White and directed by Miguel Arteta, sounds like one of those embracing-the-inner-child heart-tuggers that Hollywood loves, like the current The Kid. In performance, it’s volatile, transgressive, and unsettlingly funny—an amalgam of Persona and What About Bob?, as staged by Rushmore’s Max Fischer Players. White plays Buck O’Brien, a socially infantile man living at his mother’s home in perpetual pubescence. Buck is 27, but emotionally he’s been stunted since the age of 12, when his best buddy Chuck moved away and lost touch.
Now Chuck is Charlie, an L.A. music exec with a fiancée, and Buck’s mother is dead. Thus freed, Buck loads up his lollipops, his Dynamite!-inspired decorations, and his theme music, an infernally chipper anthem whose primary lyrics are “fun” and “oodley.” He moves into a seedy L.A. motel and insinuates himself into Charlie’s life through wheedling, guilt trips, and outright stalking. When that fails, Buck turns to art. Setting up shop across from Charlie’s office, he produces a bizarre children’s play called “Hank & Frank” that lays out their past as an Ed Wood expulsion from Eden, or Oz. The wicked witch bears an uncanny resemblance to Charlie’s fiancée.
White, formerly a producer on the Freaks and Geeks TV series, uses his soft, unformed features to suggest a being in the midst of transformation; at times he resembles a larval stage of Chris Elliott. That malleability extends to the movie itself. Chuck & Buck plays much of Buck’s forlorn quest for laughs, as when he surveys Chuck/Charlie’s ritzy home for the first time and pronounces it “old people-y.” But Charlie turns out to be something much more ambiguous and conflicted than the usual stuffed-shirt-who-needs-unbuttoning. And Buck, who puts the id in kid, isn’t a cuddly arrested adolescent: He may seethe with inchoate lust, but he can’t be entirely explained away as the pent-up preteen appetite Charlie has suppressed. Chuck & Buck regards sexuality, character, and memory as shifting states of being; that alone makes it as shocking as current American movies get.
Shot on digital video, Chuck & Buck has a look as low-gloss as footage from a hotel security camera. Yet Chuy Chavez’s no-budget cinematography only adds to the movie’s discomforting intimacy, as if you’d gotten hold of a home movie too hot for comfort. The casting of Chris and Paul Weitz, the brother act behind American Pie, as Chuck and his onstage surrogate pays off surprisingly well, and Lupe Ontiveros is a hoot as the shrewd, sarcastic stage manager who becomes Buck’s director. But it’s White, the movie’s socially arrested Peter Pan, who gives the film its emotional force. With him at its center, Chuck & Buck isn’t sentimental about childhood, and it isn’t squeamish about sexuality. Unlike its hero, it’s all grown up.
—Jim Ridley
