Beau travail

A hypnotically beautiful film; it’s true what they say about Denis being a visual poet. So much of this depends upon the rhythm of the images, and once one falls into its flow the film is absolutely ravishing for most of its runtime. I did not understand this when I watched Chocolat years ago, just on the cusp of my serious interest in film, and I’m dying to rewatch the film now. I’m sure I had been too focused on plot, too attached to viewing characters through the usual lens: here I see it’s all about giving in to a wonderfully meandering journey, led by one of the most effective uses of narration I’ve ever seen in film, through the lives and relationships of a group of legionnaires in Djibouti. I watched Chocolat in the context of a gender studies course, then conditioned to assess things like the erotic gaze and the representation of bodies; the training could be put to good use here, Denis’ treatment of the male body not exactly eroticized, studied lingeringly or in close-up detail, but rather humanized, displayed in the flesh, certainly, but in all its strength and fragility, its response to rote command, viewed kinetically and usually in full frame. There are homoerotic tensions in it, between the narrator and his object of scorn/desire, and in some of the more sensitive and artful scenes of communal brotherhood, but all that is tempered realistically by other aspects of army life and in the soldiers’ leisure time with local girls. The ending is simply stunning, and careful not to spoil anything, I will only say it is one of the more compelling meditations on one’s life in cinema; it is simple, and surprising, and wonderful.