Hypnotic `Beau Travail' reworks `Billy Budd' in Africa

Movie review

XXX "Beau Travail" ("Good Work"), with Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Gregoire Colin, Marta Tafesse Kassa. Directed by Claire Denis, from a script by Denis and Jean-Paul Fargeau. 90 minutes. Egyptian. No rating; includes nudity.

Claire Denis' widely acclaimed debut movie, a moody African memoir called "Chocolat" (1988), played for nearly a year in Seattle theaters.

After that, her work was barely visible here. Of the films that followed, only "Man No Run" (1989), "I Can't Sleep" (1993) and "Nenette and Boni" (1996) made any impression, and then only fleetingly.

That could change with the release of Denis' handsome, hypnotic new picture, "Beau Travail," which borrows from both Herman Melville's and Benjamin Britten's versions of "Billy Budd," and is set once more in the French Africa of her youth.

Gregoire Colin, who played a randy pizza chef in "Nenette and Boni" (he has since been seen as the caddish villain in "The Dreamlife of Angels"), is the Billy Budd character: Gilles Sentain, a new soldier in the French Foreign Legion who gets an extra dose of attention from a commanding officer, Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor).

Denis Lavant (Juliette Binoche's lover in "Lovers on the Bridge") plays the single-named Galoup who, like the menacing Claggart in "Billy Budd," can't tolerate the fresh young recruit.

He's also jealous of the attention Forestier is paying him. As the men go through their military drills in the desert, Galoup broods and seethes, building toward a confrontation loaded with homoerotic tension. Colin and Lavant are alive to every nuance, finding a complexity in their roles that isn't always present in the source material. Eventually even Denis departs considerably from Melville, de-emphasizing the Billy Budd character's innocence while making Claggart less satanic.

The story is no longer a lethal showdown between pure good and pure evil, and the equivocating Capt. Vere character (Subor's Forrestier), almost fades into the background.

"Beau Travail" is the closest Denis has come to recreating the lyrical atmosphere she established in "Chocolat," and visually it's just as stunning. If she'd been born at a time when she could have worked in silent movies, she'd be completely at home, although at that time she couldn't have worked in color - which she uses with uncommon grace and assurance.

The director almost seems allergic to dialogue or conventional exposition. Denis has, in her own words, "little sense for traditional narrative." Her films do not develop in a linear way, and this one has a distant, chilling quality that can be frustrating for even an art-house audience.

The gutsy performances, the music (including bits of Britten's opera) and the cinematography (by Denis' longtime collaborator, Agnes Godard) are everything here. Whether they're shooting in a disco or the desert or observing a Legionnaire obsessively ironing his uniform, Denis and Godard create a series of sharp, forceful images that do most of their storytelling.