Shaking it out in Beau Travail

The French actor Denis Lavant has the dance moves of drag royalty and the face of a man on death row, and it says something great about France that people are falling over each other to give him parts. He is incredible in Beau Travail (1999), not to be confused with Beau Geste (1926, 1939, 1966, etc.), although the 1999 title is obviously a riff – "beautiful gesture" versus "beautiful work." Both Beaux are about drama in the French Foreign Legion, but the resemblance ends there.

You could spend a whole day unpacking the suitcase of Beau Travail's title, but the brightest silk shirt to me is the nod to the older films. Despite the fact that Beau Geste is a colonialist adventure story, and Beau Travail is anti-colonialist and interested in the radioactive fallout that colonialism has settled on the world, both of them are obsessed with "gesture." Beau Travail is a dance movie, in a depressive, gay, subterranean way. It's about a lot of things – foremost among them a study of Lavant's character, an uptight drill sergeant, and his obsession with a "too perfect" young recruit – but one of them is the question of whether military training, for a war that won't happen, in a long-colonized nation, is distinct from dance, and if so whether a dance can be morally freighted. (Obviously, the answers here are no and yes.) The director Claire Denis spends a lot of time focusing on soldiers' exercises, their workouts, their agility courses, their mock battles, and she makes these things riveting by shooting them like avant-garde dances. The connection becomes explicit in the film's ending, which kind of implies, in a surprisingly subtle way, that in the instant of a closeted man's death, in the flash of light before the end, he goes to the disco.

With some art, you can't write criticism that focuses on what the art is. All you can do is talk about what it's not, because it turns everything you say back on itself, turns itself into a mirror. Beau Travail is often said to be a loose adaptation of Melville's Billy Budd, also about a military commander hung up on a younger man, with both of them dead by the end of the story. Billy Budd is definitely an influence (the film uses music from the Britten opera), but it's also barely a story, more of a set of vibes, and Beau Travail uses only about half of that.

It's also said to be a film about closeted homoerotic obsession, and it is, but not in the sense I assumed it would be. Most stories about the closet are about something being suppressed, tamped down. They are about potential energy forced into a smaller and smaller space until there's some kind of explosion. In Beau Travail, the energy is loose, surprisingly easy. The characters, most of them Legionnaires, have chosen nonexistence. They have participated in the Legion's tradition of fighting under assumed names, and chosen to devote themselves to years of endless training in the Djibouti desert, to no obvious end. Their bodies float freely in the sand. The sign has become detached from the signified. Nothing is being suppressed because there's nothing there.

Even Lavant's character, Galoup, who is as tightly wound as a man can be, has an odd mellowness to him. When he tries to kill the recruit, Sentain, by sending him on an orienteering trip with a sabotaged compass, we don't see him seethe or soliloquize. He just does what he feels he has to do, easily and naturally. Obviously, he's not a man who is doing good, or doing well. But his obsession is reduced to a function of his body, like breathing.

Part of the reason Galoup is obsessed with Sentain is because of their mutual colleague, the base commander Bruno Forestier. The outwardly stoic and macho Forestier is somewhat more obviously closeted than Galoup is. Galoup explains in voiceover that he's always been dogged by unspecified "rumors," and we also have a chance to learn about Forestier in a quiet, private scene in which he prepares for the day. He looks at a photo of himself as a younger man, he fretfully pulls at his face to smooth out the wrinkles, he fastens on a bracelet that says "Bruno" – there are a lot of ways to read the scene, most obviously that he's simply a vain and self-absorbed man, but that wasn't the reading that came into my head when I first saw it. Instead, I assumed that Forestier's Legionnaire name is self-chosen – that the real "Bruno" was a man he loved when he was younger, and the bracelet a memento of him – and that his anxiety about aging is about moving further away from that time. If Forestier were really a vain man, he wouldn't have chosen a job that involved so much sun.

Forestier is obviously drawn to the younger Sentain. He publicly praises him, ambiguously flirts with him, gives him the kind of admiration he's never given Galoup (who tells us that Forestier knows Galoup is an ideal Legionnaire, but doesn't give a damn about it). So, unlike in Billy Budd, there's substantial room for a reading that the main character isn't even especially obsessed with the younger man – he's obsessed with the older one. Perhaps the closeted and homophobic Galoup sees Sentain's presence as morally dangerous for Forestier; perhaps it's simple jealousy, the fear of losing him. Or the fear of losing equilibrium, that easy clarity by which he and Forestier have always been the "parents" of the base, functioned as a couple without anyone having to talk about two men in love.

Nobody ever talks about it. There's plenty of dialogue and voiceover, but nobody ever talks about it. They move about it, train about it, dance about it; they subsume it, whatever it is, into the actions of their bodies, so that they don't have to suppress it, and therefore don't have to do something about it. The result is a film totally unlike anything else I've seen – about colonizers on an endless, pointless exercise, about queer men who've chosen to try and walk it off, and about how impossible it is to suppress beauty. The desert these men are working to hold down is beautiful. They will fail in their work. This country will be there after they're dead.