Colonialism & Masculinity in Beau Travail

In Claire Denis’s 1999 film Beau Travail, a military veteran named Galoup narrates his final days in the French Foreign Legion. While training recruits in France’s African colony of Djibouti, Galoup admires yet resents his dismissive commander Bruno. When a mysterious new legionnaire earns Bruno’s praise, Galoup is consumed by jealousy. The film’s remainder pans out as an obsessively masculine power-play.

Beau Travail details the colonized space’s concurrent rupture and merging of experience. The opening scene postures Djibouti residents alongside legionnaires in the same nightclub; while this transmits a common relationship, the club’s French soundtrack underlines a cultural hierarchy. We are transferred from a scene of leisure to one of violence, as cultural melding is figured through historical subjection. Following a legionnaire training sequence, a much-quieter scene displays Djibouti women making a rug sale; here, two cultural moments register within the same setting yet depart thematically. Incongruity is more clearly exuded when locals pass by legionnaires with wide-eyed scrutiny, marking them as visibly out-of-place. Terms of Otherness are subtly flipped, rightfully reaffirming the legionnaires’ invading presence while upholding the locals’ cultural legitimacy.

The film stylistically stresses an objectified masculinity. While Galoup carries the plot with his overbearing narrative presence, his legionaries are relegated to interchangeable bodies. Especially in the exercise scenes, the recruits form a revolving door of shaved heads and muscular builds; in the underwater sequence, goggles fashion their physiques with further anonymity. These largely-silent characters have no room for selfhood, as they are formed in response to Galoup’s neurosis. Their bodies are moreover made only desirable through endlessly-punishing calisthenics. Ironically, the military reverses the mind/body divide by which masculine and feminine subjects are socially ordered. If feminine worth is tied to physical beauty, the legionnaires’ professions mandate a similarly-corporal value; the lingering camera invites lustful consumption over human relation.