WATCH PARTY: Beau Travail (1999) directed by Claire Denis @ Mary Pretlow Library

We will be in the large room, Meeting Room 1, for this one. I asked ChatGPT to rank a random handful of films I was thinking about for "visual impact". It ranked this at #1 and said, "Every frame is composed like a painting, with light, movement, and landscape doing as much storytelling as the dialogue." Alrighty, then.

RUNTIME: 90 minutes

SYNOPSIS (via Criterion.com): With her ravishingly sensual take on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Claire Denis firmly established herself as one of the great visual tone poets of our time. Amid the azure waters and sunbaked desert landscapes of Djibouti, a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) sows the seeds of his own ruin as his obsession with a striking young recruit (Grégoire Colin) plays out to the thunderous, operatic strains of Benjamin Britten. Denis and cinematographer Agnès Godard fold military and masculine codes of honor, 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.

BLURBS:
"As much poem as film. It requires patience, which it rewards at every languid turn." - Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News

"'Beau Travail' is the most extreme example of [Denis'] talent, baffling and exhilarating. I don’t know when I’ve seen a movie that is in so many ways foreign to what draws me to movies and still felt under a spell." - Charles Taylor, *Salon.com*

"Knocked my socks off. It felt like greatness. It was beautiful, and emotional, and surreal, but also deeply satisfying." - Greta Gerwig, director of Barbie