Beau travail: time, space and myths of

identity
Martine Beugnet and Jane Sillars

Abstract
Claire Denis’s Beau travail, is a highly stylised adaptation of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd,
transferred into the world of the French Foreign Legion. This paper traces how, through its highly
worked aesthetic, the film illustrates the obsolescence of an ethos: military, patriarchal and colonial.
It examines the way the film establishes the Legion as a metaphor for the French colonial project,
in its elevation of the ideal of universality and in its insistence on assimilation. The article explores
how the film’s narrative exposes the tensions which emerge from within and without to threaten the
illusory cohesion of this collective identity. Through a close attention to the use of camera and mise-
en-scene the article then considers how the film removes the Legion from its idealised and mythical
space of universality, re-siting it into a located and particular place, subject to the movement of
history.

Claire Denis’s Beau travail/Good Work (1999) is a rich and visually ravishing text. It
offers an interrogation of notions of collective identity – military, patriarchal, national
and colonial – within the setting of the French Foreign Legion, and an exploration of
their collapse into difference, disintegration, and obsolescence.
With heavily restricted use of dialogue, and borrowings from dance, theatre and
opera, the film draws our attention to a narrative explored through framing, gesture and
mise-en-scène. It offers a highly stylised and self-conscious aesthetic working of its
themes, with reference to a dizzying array of intertexts. This film draws on a range of
debates about identity, colonialism and aesthetics, and lays itself open to a wide variety
of readings and approaches. The film functions as a kind of palimpsest, accreting an
array of textual fragments, moving between epic and tragic modes, evoking the resonant
uncanny of Herman Melville’s work, and the lyricism of the poètes maudits, drawing
on classical cinema and classical antiquity. These layers of storytelling are not unified,
but leave their traces in the text, manifesting themselves in its complex working of time,
space and causality.
This article approaches these questions through the notion of identity. In the first
instance, we discuss collective identity, dramatised in the film through the elite body of
the French Foreign Legion: a body drenched in myth and constructed through image
and story-telling, the Legion, by extension, embodies a certain fantasy of French
national and colonial identity. Then we turn to its relation with individual identity,
looking at how the narrative stages the contradictory desires within certain models of
masculinity.
We want to think about how Beau travail lays bare these processes of myth and
identity construction – both its beauty and seductiveness, and the labour that goes into
its formation – and to examine how the narrative progression and the visual structure of
the film expose the collapse of this fantasy of a single unified, collective identity.
Therefore the body of this paper is divided into three main parts. First, we consider
the construction of collective identity within the Legion. Here we are particularly
interested in the relation between the Legion’s concept of belonging, which offers
individuals integration within its corps d’élite, apparently regardless of ethnicity, religion

166 SFC 1 (3) 166–173 © Intellect Ltd 2001

and nationality; and the wider French revolutionary ideal of national identity/
belonging, resting on universality through assimilation. Second, we examine the
tensions which emerge in the film’s narrative, threatening this illusory cohesiveness of
the union from within and without. We examine how Denis positions the closed
system of the Legion in opposition to the open economy of the local Djiboutiens; and
how the eruption of desire in this closed system ruptures its unity, destabilises its
authority and reveals its internal divisions and inequality. Lastly, we look at how the film
removes the Legion from its idealised and mythical space of universality, resiting it into
a located and particular place in history and geography.
We will therefore concentrate on analysing the film’s narrative and enunciation,
thinking especially about the use of mise-en-scène and the way the camera frames the
action. As the first comments of diegetic narration in the film point out to us, yoking
the martial and the cinematic, ‘viewpoints matter. Angles of attack’.

The Legion, assimilation and integration

Beau travail was shot as part of a series of films commissioned by ARTE on the theme of
foreignness – a choice of subject by the TV channel that signals how central to French
culture in particular the debate on postcoloniality and identity has become.
In Facing Postmodernity, Max Silverman underlines the reason for the acuity of the
contemporary malaise in the French context:

France was the quintessential modern nation state. Nowhere else did the star of
equality, freedom and solidarity burn so bright (...). On the one hand, French
enlightenment philosophy provided the concepts for the pursuit of a higher form of
humanity. The Revolution was the political blueprint for transforming those
concepts into ‘natural law’. The spirit of French Republicanism, embodied in the
slogan ‘the one and indivisible Republic (La Republique une et indivisible), symbolised
the persistence of this utopian dream of a shared humanity. (Silverman 1999: 3)

But this utopian dream, Silverman adds, rested on the successful construction and
repression or assimilation of an ‘other’, a process that, again, he pinpoints as particularly
central to the elaboration of French national identity:

The homogenizing zeal of republicanism under the Third Republic, born from the
mission to vanquish the ‘forces of reaction’ and to fuse the nation into an
indissoluble unity (...). The assimilation of diverse people around common goals,
leading to a mad quest for uniformity in the name of equality (...) did not have its
direct equivalent elsewhere. (Silverman 1999: 4)

Within this context, it is easy to understand how the Foreign Legion came to occupy a
special place in the French collective imaginary and colonial history. Just as the modern
French nation consciously modelled itself on some of the values and forms of the
ancient republics, so the Legion draws ideologically and iconographically on the models
of classical antiquity. Its band of male warriors (a classical phalanx in the Song of the
Legion) embody the ancient union of the beautiful and the good, their bravery and
valour an expression of the manly virtues.
Those who join the Legion leave their histories behind; they are re-named; their
bodies are reshaped through training; they are reclothed in uniformity. The film’s visual
address repeatedly plays to us this process of fusion that is able to metabolise even the

Beau travail: time, space and myths of identity 167

1 The enduring nature of marks of ethnicity. In the scene that opens the movie, the soldiers in uniforms and with
this iconography is shaven heads are contrasted with the local women, shown parading their difference –
attested to in Elizabeth
the hairstyles, the clothes with their diverse fabric and pattern, varied dances – in front
Ezra’s interesting discus-
sion of the rhetoric
of the nightclub’s mirror.
surrounding France’s The legion’s mythical self-image offers fusion within a collective ideal that subsumes
multi-racial World Cup individuality and sublimates desire within its enduring rules of tradition and discipline.
1998 winning football This apparent integration of races and religions is then played back as part of the visual
team (Ezra 2000). iconography of the Legion, promoting its ideology of belonging through assimilation.
The series of close-ups of faces at the beginning of the film immediately calls to mind
Barthes’s famous analysis of the Paris Match cover of a black soldier saluting the French
flag, and his summary of the message that underlines such imagery: ‘France is a great
empire, (...) all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her
flag’ (Barthes 1993: 116).1 This integration is predicated on the unquestioning
acceptance of the universal verity and validity of the Laws of the Legion, and by
extension of the universality of the values of the French nation. Schor stresses how
‘French colonialism is represented as an act of generosity rather than of oppression,
conferring upon its objects the privilege of participating in France’s defining
universalism’ (Schor 1985: 6).
Denis offers a comic take on this privilege, with a Russian Legionnaire’s induction
to the language of his adopted nationality through a laundry line tutorial where he
learns the correct terms for underpants and vests. This forms part of the film’s repeated
emphasis on the the everyday and the domestic. The Legionnaires iron, bake birthday
cakes and argue over how many onions should go in the stew. While, together with the
hierarchical structure and relinquishing of responsibility and past, this strange and quasi-
familial domesticity emphasises the practically and emotionally autarchic dimension of
military life, the film’s insistence on the mundane undermines the mythology of hyper-
masculinity, revealing the labour of construction which goes into its production.
In her critical assessment of the ‘logic that subtends French assimilationism’, Schor
underlines how ‘an Arab woman, a black man, a Jew, can acquire French identity
providing they relinquish all claims to their cultural (religious, linguistic) differences’
(Schor 1985: 6). The narrative action of Beau travail also dramatises the consequences of
the breakdown of this contract of assimilation through the abandonment of difference.
The film’s murderous punishment is set in motion by the actions of Combé, the black
Moslem Legionnaire, who leaves his post to attend a local mosque during Ramadan.
The harshness of the punishment is also a sign that its logic belongs to an obsolete
structure, on the defensive. The Legion has outlived the myth that founded it. The
form, ‘shallow, impoverished, isolated’ (Barthes 1999: 117), has outlived the concept,
and a body like the Legion functions on a double denial: the initial denial of a diverse
history in favour of one hegemonic discourse, and the further denial of the demise of
the grand narrative of French imperialism.

Narrative form and the irruption of difference

Beau travail takes its narrative form and character functions from Herman Melville’s
novella Billy Budd. It tells the strange tale of the unworldly and beautiful Handsome
Sailor, Billy Budd; his mysterious persecution by the envious and perverse master at
arms, his immediate superior, Claggart; and his ambiguous relationship with the ship’s
captain and ultimate dispenser of naval authority, Captain Vere. Here, these figures
become transformed into the beautiful conscript, Sentain; his sergeant, Galoup; and the
idealised commander, Forestier. In Melville’s telling the story of this triangular

168 Martine Beugnet and Jane Sillars

relationship becomes almost overset by the weight of symbolic and allegorical meaning
in which the tale is expressed. The shifting triangle of relationships, borrowed in Beau
travail, forms ‘an infernal machine’ (Beaver 1967: 40) in which all three characters
become ‘nipped in the vice of fate’ (Melville 1967: 386).
This sense of the inexorability of fate becomes all the more pronounced in Denis’s
retelling of the tale, through its use of visual imagery and the framing of the tale.
Underneath the stately progress of the narrative lies the implication that everything has
already always happened. The story is framed in flashback, and structured through
Galoup’s reflections on his fate. The characters’ relations to one another are over-
determined, both through the strict hierarchy of the Legion’s system of authority, and
through the intertextual nature of their actions. This over-determination is made most
visible in Sentain’s blow to Galoup which seals his fate and sets his punishment in
motion: the blow is silent and filmed in slow motion.
The visual imagery of the net recurs in the film, linking and containing the three
central characters: a net of light over Forestier’s features; the net that pulls Sentain from
the ocean; the chain-link fence framing the action; the diamond mirrors that close
around Galoup’s final dance. The net is Aeschylus’ favoured imagery for the triangle of
Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in his Oresteia, all snared in the deadly net of
fate. Denis’s use of music, dance and opera highlights the theatricality of the
confrontations repeated in Beau travail. The circling dance of Galoup and Sentain reveals
them as agonists in a staged combat, playing out their allotted roles.
Most marked in Denis’ retelling of this story, however, is the decision to focalise the
narrative through the perceptions of Galoup. His reminiscences structure the narrative,
and his voice-over carries much of the explicit narrative information. The information
is filtered through his subjectivity, yet the camera-work and editing deny us any secure
position to judge the reliability of his narration. The relationships between the three
men – Sentain, Galoup and Forestier – form a complex nexus of exchange: of desire
and envy; of similarity and difference; of projection and repression. It is difficult to
understand the nature of these currents between the participants, and the film works to
deny us, as an audience, any privileged access or information. When Forestier may be
eyeing up Sentain at the dinner table, the organisation of space through the look of the
camera offers us no secure vantage point on their interaction. There are no establishing
shots to reveal to us the spatial layout of the scene, or their physical relationship to one
another. Instead we are shown sidelong and repressed glances, their object and reception
unclear to us. There are no eyeline matches offered to acknowledge contact or
exchange. Instead we are dependent on Galoup’s narrative and his interpretation of
events.
Galoup’s retrospective explanation suggests that Forestier’s response to Sentain
creates a threat: a threat to Forestier, to Galoup, and to their position and inscription
within the Legion. While Claggart’s ‘depravity’ in Billy Budd manifests desire and envy
perverted into hate, here the suggestion is of a more diffuse and complex flow of
emotion. Sentain’s transgression is to stand out from the collective. He is selected for
notice by Forestier for his valour – he is picked out of the line-up of Legionnaires and
congratulated for bravery – and for his beauty – in a more ambiguous moment of
preferment Forestier lights a cigarette with him on night duty.
Galoup’s jealous rage is motivated by both Sentain’s qualities and Forestier’s notice.
He does not simply desire Sentain, but desires to be in his place. The desire Galoup
fears and seeks to avert in Forestier is both his own active desire for Sentain projected
onto Forestier; and his wish to be the object of Forestier’s desire thwarted by the arrival

Beau travail: time, space and myths of identity 169

of Sentain. Both his desire and his fear become, literally, perverted, re-directed from
their proper objects.
Galoup’s persecution of Sentain can then be read as an attempt to preserve the unity
of the Legion, to interrupt or turn aside what he imagines as the current of desire from
Forestier to Sentain. We can see here not simply a narrative of repressed individual
desire, but rather the exploration of Galoup’s emotional investment in the Legion, its
system of authority and its submergence of the individual: a system of identity and
control that colonises Galoup’s interiority. (It is possible to read the highly stylised dance
sequences as a further expression of Galoup’s idealised imagining of the Legion. Initially
they play out a rapturous but undifferentiated vision of physical sameness and
choreographed movement, as desire is successfully projected onto the collective body.
As the bounds of repression falter, the dance sequences become more violent and more
focussed on Sentain, with images of clasping, contact, rescue and conflict
foregrounded.) Crucially for the film’s organisation of narrative, this irruption of desire
and the failure of the mechanisms of correct repression and expression emerge because
of what the triangle’s machinery exposes of the proper functioning of the Legion.
It is not simply an economy of sameness, but one of difference held in check
through its subordination to systems of hierarchy and authority. This authority is not
singular, but is divided between the persons of Forestier and Galoup. While the Song of
the Legion celebrates the duty of the Legionnaires to love and to obey their superiors,
these responses are split: the idealised and distant commander Forestier, the object of
love; the authoritarian sergeant, Galoup, the object of fear. (This drama of elevation and
degradation is played out in the visual images accompanying this verse, as the
Legionnaires dive into and clamber out of a pit.) These roles maintain their force
despite the individual performances of the characters inhabiting them; Forestier may
adopt a cynical approach to the ideals of the Legion, but he still embodies its mythic
glamour in a way inaccessible to the martinet, Galoup, charged with the day to day
maintenance of its order. Just as with the split in function between a monarch or head
of state and an elected politician, the more one is elevated and eternal, the more the
other is rendered vulnerable and despised. The advent of Sentain exposes this division in
function and the impossibility of holding together this collective entity: at once an
idealised and unified body, and a grouping of diverse and internally divided individual.
This closed economy of the Legion is in stark contrast with the open exchange of
the Djiboutiens. They are shown engaged in trade and barter; buying rugs, procuring
qat for the commander, selling salt-encrusted curiosities. Their willingness to swap like
for unlike reveals how the Legion’s stasis depends on its regime of similarity. The threat
to the idealised collective identity, and the disruption of the economy of the Legion, are
resolved through the expulsion of first Sentain, then Galoup, as it attempts to suppress
the possibility of change and erotic or violent exchange.

Myth into history

This repression of desire – the denial of lack and of the possibility and inevitability of
change – is effected at the level of the plot through the expulsion of Sentain, then of
Galoup, but parallels other figurations of transcendence and resistance to the
fluctuations of time and identity. These figurations emerge though the narrative content
– the detailed sequences dedicated to the description of the mundane daily routines, for
instance, and through narrative enunciation – in the series of close-ups and the mise-
en-scene of the dance sequences, which function to slow down or to halt narrative
progression, moving from narrative to ritual. But the film’s enunciation simultaneously

170 Martine Beugnet and Jane Sillars

functions to create a tension between the space of myth and that of history revealing,
through camera work and editing, the gaps at the heart of the strategies of containment
and transcendence.
The film’s play with classical references, evoking ancient Greece in particular, works
to underline the archaism not only of the military structure, but also of the concept of
history it seems to embrace: one that denies man’s historical being, that conceives of
time as cyclical and folding on itself. Through its stylised aesthetics, the film portrays a
body of men that creates and inhabits a space and time of its own, one that resists
historical realities and relies on the exclusion of any ‘other’ that cannot be assimilated –
the women, the Djiboutiens.
The dominant aesthetic in Beau travail’s early sequences emphasizes close-up and
tight framing in compositions that isolate the human figure. Removing it from its spatial
background, they focus on the body and the movement of the body, downplaying the
sense of location, as well as perspective and depth. In the sequence where, at the
beginning of the film, the soldiers are portrayed in a series of close-ups set against the
sky, tight framing of the figure is used in one of its most familiar functions – to create a
sense of the epic and the heroic. At the same time, the close-up does not yield any of its
classical narrative functions of clarification. It works to create a series of detached
images linked to each other by a relation of contiguity and resemblance. Set against the
sky, the shaved heads, sculpted features and smooth, muscled physiques of the soldiers
offer a highly idealised vision of male bodies. This repeated series of images draws on
Greek notions of the alliance of beauty and valour. In the likeness of figure movement
and framing, it further celebrates a particular ideal of belonging as a form of
transcendence founded on the abandonment of the individual self.
In this sequence, the use of the close-up calls to mind Martin’s definition of it as ‘an
invasion of the field of consciousness’ (Martin 1985: 43). In a recent article, Judith Roof
underlines how, through the elision of distance and perspective, the proliferation of the
close-up can evoke a ‘lost nostalgic field’, a ‘field of dreams forever irrecuperable’, ‘the
illusion of a field that only exists as imaginary’ (Roof 1999: 5). There is a sense in
which the stylisation of the composition and editing, and the conjunction of effects
such as classical references, the presence of the elements (sea, and sky) to connote
transcendence, saturates the frame with signifiers of the mythical to the extent where
the images are not simply an evocation of the myth of the French Legion, but of the
very concept of myth itself. This foregrounding of the constructed, aestheticised nature
of the colonial and the military discourse also works to call attention to that which is
denied: their physical positioning, both local and historical. The sequence changes
abruptly with a medium close-up on Galoup, gazing in a different direction, and
remarkable in his physical dissimilarity to the group.
The local and historical dimension is reinstated within the film in various ways.
Through the look of the local people in particular as, in a neat reversal of the colonial
gaze, the group of men is constantly being watched, reduced, in the aimlessness of their
detached existence, to the status of exotic spectacle. It is reinstated also through the
widening of the frame of action. The sterility of the landscape that is revealed by the
Legion’s move up country forms an obvious visual counterpart to the obsolescence of
their own continuation, with Galoup describing the extinct volcanoes guarding their
camp. As the mise-en-scène opens up and the importance of the close-up and the tight
framing diminishes, the Legion is revealed moving aimlessly through a misunderstood
and barren landscape. Not quite synchronised to the speed of the travelling shot that
pans across, the soldiers walk from right to left, creating a frieze effect, parallel to the

Beau travail: time, space and myths of identity 171

2 This strange horizon, eschewing depth of field and the idea of exploration. In many ways, the film
juxtaposition can also be echoes Frantz Fanon’s description of the postcolonial subject as ‘individuals without
seen in the film’s
anchors, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless – a race of angels’ (Fanon 1963:
ambiguous closing
sequences; moving from
176). The legionnaires inhabit a world devoid of the usual situating landmarks. The
Galoup cradling a pistol space they occupy appears constituted independently from the charting of the land by
in his Marseilles bedsit road, and by rail tracks. They build roads to nowhere, working alongside existing lines
to images of him danc- of communication, traversed by purposeful and curious Djiboutiens.
ing with himself in the
The sense of aimlessness and the fragility of the Legion’s artificially maintained
nightclub, caught in its
net of mirrors. The existence is also constantly threatened by the resurfacing of fragments of other temporal
multiplicity of reflection and spatial planes. Distinctions between objective and internal reality, exteriority and
again invokes Deleuze: interiority, memory and dreams, become blurred, and the certainties of place and time
‘Contrary to the form dissolve in jarring cuts, superimpositions and backwash movements reminiscent of
of the true, which is
Deleuze’s explorations of the time-image (Deleuze 1985). The fleeting image of the
unifying and strives for
the identification of a
shepherdess for instance, although inserted between two shots of Galoup resting remains
character (its discovery disconnected, suspended (like a Deleuzian crystal-image) between the virtual and the
or simply its coherence), actual.2
the power of the false Earlier, the fragmentation and lack of direction that has characterised the charting
cannot be separated of space and time by the camera and the editing even invades the diegetic dimension as
from the irreducible
multiplicity. “I is
Sentain finally gets lost. Having taken the defence of Combé, the Muslim soldier
another” has replaced punished for deserting his post in order to pray at the mosque, Sentain is condemned to
ME equals ME’ a solitary walk through miles of deserted land. It is impossible to grasp with any
(Deleuze 1985: 174). precision the spatial and causal relation between the various shots that compose the
elliptically edited sequence that depicts and follow his being driven out and left to find
his way back. Sentain’s meanderings and the passing of the train, for instance, or with
Galoup’s presence at the barracks, cannot be related precisely in terms of distance,
closeness, simultaneity of time, or in terms of the character’s perception and point-of-
view. When the exhausted Sentain finally stops, the picture of the salt-ridden beach
where he has laid down literally fills the screen, its whiteness and sameness denying the
possibility of finding any secure orientation.
The legion is portrayed as threatened by the very logic that governs it. Susan
Hayward underlines in this volume how the dances epitomise the legionnaires’
disappearing selves, how their bodies, moving against a background of sand, leave no
traces. But the relationship between bodies and earth also signals the constant pull of the
organic, the suggestion that this collective body is being reclaimed by the natural world;
that, in spite of the routines, always effected to perfection, in spite of the perfect folds of
the uniform, the soldiers are at risk of merging with the plants and the rocks as the first
dance, entitled the dance of the weeds, exemplifies: the machinery is already being
colonised by the sand, and the legionnaires move in the wind like the weeds around
them.
Sentain’s near-death can be read in these terms. Yet, his rescue by a group of local
travellers, from the bed of blindingly white salt which eats at his skin, also curiously
echoes, in visual terms, two contrasted notions of foreignness. The self-effacing logic of
the Legion’s anachronistic ideal of oneness, assimilation and exclusion, and the
description, by Kristeva, of the contemporary foreigner. In Strangers to Ourselves she
writes ‘Rimbaud’s “I is an other” was not only the avowal of the psychotic phantom
that haunts poetry. The word announced exile, the possibility or the necessity of being
foreign and of living in the foreigner’s country, thus prefiguring the art of living in a
modern era, the cosmopolitanism of the excoriated’ (Kristeva 1994: 25).
The space of myth – free-floating, unanchored in space and time, cyclical and

172 Martine Beugnet and Jane Sillars

repetitive -is reframed through the film’s visual form into the space of history – situated,
local and specific. Yet, the shadow of colonisation does not simply evaporate in the
desert air. In Beau travail, the two dimensions co-exist, and interpenetrate through the
film’s ability to hold in tension the ghosts and echoes of its various source texts. In its
poetic portrayal of colonial obsolescence, Beau travail shows the appeal of the myth of
oneness and sameness, while simultaneously moving away from an ‘organic narration’ to
suggest its impossibility. Dismantling the apparent coherence and fixity of the time and
space that the Legion inhabits, the film conjures up the pull of the historical dimension,
riddled by the anxiety of time passing, but through its recognition of ‘the force of time
as change’ (Rodowick 1997: 20), opening up possibilities of creative transformation.

References
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Deleuze, G. (1989) Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Paul Patton, New York,
Columbia University Press.
Ezra, E. (2000) The Postcolonial Unconscious, Ithaca and London, Cornell University
Press.
Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, London, Pluto.
Kristeva, J. (1994) Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia
University Press.
Martin, M. (1985) Le Langage cinématographique, Paris, Les Editions du Cerf.
Melville, H. (1967), Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, London, Penguin English
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Rodowick, D.N. (1997) ‘La Critique ou la vérité en crise’, Iris 23, pp 3-25.
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Society, London, Routledge.

Beau travail: time, space and myths of identity 173