Beau Travail
A sensory masterpiece about military codes of honour and destructive jealousy, previously unreleased in the Netherlands. Finished seventh in film magazine Sight & Sound's poll of greatest films of all time.
With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s novella BILLY BUDD, SAILOR, Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sun-baked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honour, colonialism’s legacy, destructive jealousy, and repressed desire into shimmering, hypnotic images that ultimately explode in one of the most startling and unforgettable endings in all of modern cinema. (source: Criterion)