2025 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Blue Scott
Beau Travail: Transcending Body
by Blue Scott
Amongst an arid rocky landscape, the deep turquoise of an ocean, and the fever pitch of a blue sky, nestles the many bodies of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail.
The story follows Sergeant Galoup of the French Foreign Legion, a stoic, quiet man, who becomes obsessed with another young soldier, Gilles Sentain, and eventually breaks free from the oppressive eye of the Legion and their commander, Forestier. The story is a sordid one, adapted from Billy Bud by Herman Melville, turned into a modern tragedy unlike any other. The plot jumps back and forth in time, between the Legion while they were stationed in Djibouti, Africa and the reflections of Galoup in France years later. The film has minimal dialogue, carried by morsels of context provided through Galoup’s internal monologue; it relies entirely on the weight, function, and beauty of bodies.
The film follows a steady pace–from body to body, beginning with young women dancing under the busy lights of a club, continuing to soldiers doing yoga in the hot sand. These two scenes, practically back-to-back, strike a visceral chord; the dark, moody light of the club casting long shadows across feminine faces, replaced by raw masculinity undisguised in direct sunlight–It’s a cruel contrast, and while the soldiers twist and turn in their almost alien exercises, the camera pans over their every move, proceeding through the flexes of muscle and movement. There is no linear narrative structure established in these early scenes, and the expectation is shaken off by the use of in media res. What is established, however, is the devotion the camera has to bodies and their power to push onwards. Immediately, we are required to inhabit a world built on instinct and observation.
Due to Beau Travail’s intimate structure, there is an air of voyeurism in certain shots. This is felt especially during the exposition of the soldier’s training: the camera is close, lingering on one man after the other. It is focused on the minute ways in which each body goes about mounting their terrain, how their strength overcomes obstacles both internal and external. It is undeniable that while watching them you begin to feel a strange sort of invigoration—You can feel the strain in their legs and the burn in their lungs and the fire in their muscles. These men are at the height of physical ability, possessing strength that most will never experience and cannot even imagine. In watching them vault stone walls and crawl under barbed wire you can’t help but inhabit them for a moment, to fantasize, perhaps vainly, of what it must feel like to be so invincible. You forget what it’s like to be stagnant. You forget that these men are in the safety of training, and there is only a fine line between training and battle. You are reminded when not halfway through the film a training helicopter crashes in the sea and there is a long shot of a body hanging in the water, proving mortality. Perhaps some of Denis’s greatest triumphs in making Beau Travail: giving us the chance to transcend our bodies, and dragging us back with the reminder that all bodies can die. In turning the bodies from something readily inhabitable to distant and cold, we are awoken to the rest of the plot, and a strange sense of reality sets in.
That is also what makes Galoup’s character so tragic—he is taught the same lesson as us multiple times with consequences to match. Galoup transcends as well. It is his only option: under the watchful, oppressive eyes of Forestier, the symbol of the Legion, he is trapped. There are many long, aching scenes where Galoup stands at a great distance from his fellow soldiers, Forestier nearby as if to keep control of his body, to stifle any human movement. Galoup’s escape through transcendence is told through masterful editing. Early in the film, before the helicopter crash that bursts the ‘transcendent’ bubble (for the audience and perhaps for Galoup as well), the Legion traverses through late night partygoers in town, disappearing into a nightclub. Galoup, on the other hand, is left out, dressed in his uniform and walking alone in the streets, Forestier not far behind in a car. The scenes cut back and forth to each other, from dancing to quiet and back again, and it is conveyed that Galoup has found a way to dance with the other men, even if he can’t in his own body. The image is repeated as the soldiers return home, carrying one another through empty streets in the early morning. Galoup is not in his uniform but a black dancing outfit, an image from the future, and he walks with them waiting to dance again.
After the helicopter crash, Sentain becomes established as an antagonistic character to Galoup. Forestier bestows admiration and recognition to Sentain, and to Galoup’s repressed mind, this is an act of betrayal. This is the first instance in which Galoup finds he can’t transcend anymore—in his barracks, he tears his uniform jacket from his shoulders, throwing it down and collapsing to the bed. The complicit emptiness that allowed him to escape has been replaced by desire: a desire to be made better by the Legion like Sentain rather than oppressed, and perhaps a desire for Sentain himself. Here, the problem of defining exactly what Galoup feels about Sentain is encountered. It is steeped in hatred–but love and hatred are not all that different, and both require passion. It’s easy to see a certain homoerotic subtext in the way Galoup hates Sentain, the film won’t let us avoid it. It barrages us with endless moments of Galoup staring at the (usually half naked) man with undeniable desire. But I believe, more than anything, that Galoup simply wants to be Sentain. He doesn’t just want to transcend, he wants to take over, to own, to replace. The most striking scene in the film comes later on, after the Legion has moved into an arid plain between three volcanoes under the command of Galoup. Galoup and Sentain circle each other on a dark gravel beach, drawing closer and closer with each step, somehow fighting without touching, and for once we can definitively see the difference in the two men. Sentain is tall, broad-shouldered and angular. Galoup is short and mottled, his body as senewy as a rope. Both are beautiful. But we can feel the hatred Galoup feels for himself through the screen, and we know who has lost the fight.
Galoup faces his final lesson of reality near the end of the film. Sentain attempts to assist a fellow soldier in his punishment by providing water, and punches Galoup when he reprimands him. Galoup takes him out to the desert and leaves him there to walk back to camp as punishment–but he tampered with Sentain’s compass, and Sentain never returns, presumed dead in the salt flats or deserted. It is agonizing as we watch Sentain fade into the gray and white landscape, his body now made more useless than we are comfortable with. Justice comes as his compass is discovered amongst wares sold by a group of locals, confirming his disappearance, and Galoup is discharged from the Legion. We are provided privileged knowledge that Sentain actually was rescued, but there’s no weight to it. No one will ever know, and both Galoup and Sentain are lost either way.
Outside of the Legion, years later in France, Galoup has not shaken the repression of the Legion. France, in comparison with Djibouti, is a shimmering fog of a city. In Djibouti, Galoup was never alone; we, as the audience, were never alone, as the interspersed images of local women and men and children kept us company as they watched the Legion occupy their reality. In France, Galoup is solitary. Throughout the film, some glimpses of Galoup’s life in France are provided, but it never lingers long enough to dilute the astonishing body of Africa—the images slowly accumulate until we finally leave Africa behind in the past and see a full image of mundanity, of a diminutive life. It becomes apparent that even by himself Galoup feels watched by Forestier, and therefore by the Legion as a whole. His transcendence is stifled by his loneliness; he hasn’t found his way back into his own body. Galoup inhabits nothing, nobody. He exists through the habits he learned in the Legion. He cuts kindling from the tree outside his window with a machete. He irons his shirts with precision. He makes his bed military-style before lying across it with his gun.
“La mission est sacrée, tu l'exécutes jusqu'au bout et, s'il le faut, en opérations, au péril de ta vie. The mission is sacred, you carry it out until the end and, if necessary in the field, at the risk of your life.”
Galoup’s suicide at the end of the film is not shown. Instead, we watch as he lies on the bed, resting his gun on his stomach, just under his ribcage. The gun is harsh against his skin, and the focus is entirely on the life inside of his body versus the object that will end it. Then, we see his chest, where a faded tattoo in purple ink reads “Serve the good cause and die.” The camera traces the curve of Galoup’s bicep, his arm tucked under his head, and lands on a pulsing vein just before his bent elbow. There we stay, the jerking vein jumping underneath his skin, a free movement under the weight of oncoming violence.
The film concludes back in Africa. In the drowsy tinted lights of the nightclub that opened the film, Galoup is out of the glare of the sun. He is in his otherworldly black clothes. He is alone, but also surrounded by tiled mirrors. He sees himself reflected in them, and even smiles. The Rhythm of the Night plays at an astonishing volume. There is no one watching, and Galoup begins to dance. The dance breathes the same life into us as the soldiers’ training, but rather than feeding into our vanities and desires, it fills us with the opportunity of our own bodies. Perhaps Galoup has transcended into himself, or even past himself, blurring the lines of death, freedom, and the way bodies do “good work.”