Rhythm of the Night

Beau Travail (1999)

Shamefully the only Denis I've seen but Mein. Gott!! Knocked me off my feet. Watched this a few months ago and I didn't immediately write down my thoughts so now I'm trying to recall...

Movement! Gestures! Glances! Male identity crisis!! A ballet film!! The images we see are Lavant's recollections, real or possibly manufactured, sometimes articulations of his anger, his anxieties and most certainly his desires. There's a helicopter crash, a military funeral, parades, punctuated by discos. A body of young men spending their days in training, in calisthenics, preparing meals and washing and ironing their uniforms. Lots of ironing--reminded me of Meek's Cutoff, both films by women that put the minutia, the "women's work" on display. But the thick heat can tire those creases and passions may be unleashed.

All this preparation, all this ritual, but for what? There's no enemy, just preparation and potential deployment.

F.T. Prince reading his poem "Soldiers Bathing"

The film is a hymn to the homo-eroticism of male bonding and a study of how a person excluded from that camaraderie might be driven to acts of vengeance. and the camera moves like it's always on the hunt, searching and stalking by the grace of Agnes Godard. In Ornette Coleman like chaotic harmony, every! cut! is! explosive!

'Maybe freedom begins with remorse,' pines the lonely Lavant. We've all got an innate attachment to our losses. Rather than finding satisfaction in escaping it, Lavant repeats his failure as its own form of gratification “because this repetition, even though it isn’t pleasing to us, holds the secret to our enjoyment" (McGowan). Masochism!! Gotta love it.

The ending of the film lives up to the hype. Properly making his bed in a scene heavy laden with the threat of suicide it then cuts to a (vision?) broad smiled tableau that works totally counter to the mode that the rest of the film operates under: tight compositions and closeups that frame muscular human bodies like they're mountains and landscapes of their own. Then the Rhythm of the Night, in solitude, the dreams of catharsis and dreams of relent. My jaw dropped, my mouth AGAPE.

THE GIRLS!!! 

“When we were rehearsing, I never told the actors that I had in mind to use the Benjamin Britten music - Billy Budd, that we had been listening while writing the script. So I played back the music while shooting. But the wind was blowing so strong they couldn’t hear very well. So they heard a sort of music in the wind… Suddenly… all their gestures became so solemn. I don’t know, like the beginning of the world or something like that.” 

-Claire Denis

Sources: Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema by Todd McGowan

**Seen in Theatre 1 @NWFF, After Hours