✯✯✯✯✯

In English, “Beau Travail” translates out to “good work,” which is the perfect way to describe what one is to expect from what the characters do in Beau Travail. Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail is one that embraces how it feels to have achieved something that truly happens to be so great, but also the jealousy that would come forth especially from a field that is often touted for being the greatest service to humanity. But Claire Denis makes a different sort of film about the military, one that many others wouldn’t ever manage to come close to creating because it’s an angle that often seems to be unfamiliar to films with similar subject matter. If there’s anything else to be said, it’s also what makes the work of Claire Denis every bit as hypnotic as it is, for you’re sitting there watching her strip down masculinity to its bare bones in order to make one of the best films about repressed emotions and their effect on the human condition. It’s a film that’s so beautiful for its own nakedness, but among the many hypnotic qualities that Beau Travail carries they neither stop nor end there.

Continue reading →