The Beau Travails
French director CLAIRE DENIS revisits how she took on the Foreign Legion (and won) in the making of a masterpiece
IT’S FAIR TO say that the French Foreign Legion weren’t particularly happy. “They thought we were going to do a gay porno movie about the Legion,” says director Claire Denis bluntly. The film in question: 1999’s Beau Travail and what could have already — and accurately — been described as a challenging production.
It hadn’t begun that way, though. It had started much more optimistically. Denis — already with several shorts and breakthrough debut feature Chocolat under her belt — was approached with a commission from French and German television production company ARTE.
“The theme I was offered was how you could describe what it is to be foreign,” she remembers. “I took it for granted to keep the word ‘foreign’. I was thinking about the word and I thought about Foreign Legion. I knew: the word ‘foreign’ is going to be my guide.”
She saw at the very least the storytelling potential that this would unlock: “The Foreign Legion is also a legend. The story is so incredible.” And with that basic premise, she opted to present it as a loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s acclaimed 1888 novella, Billy Budd, Sailor.
And while it certainly wasn’t porn, Denis and her regular writing partner Jean-pol Fargeau did create what could be described as a homoerotic reimagining of Billy Budd. The story is the remembrances of Chief Adjutant
Galoup (Denis Lavant) — of his time leading a battalion of Legionnaires in the former
French colony of Djibouti, under the authority of Commander Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor). The close group of men battle through punishing physical training in the desert before visiting nearby clubs. But Galup’s world feels threatened by new recruit Gilles Sentain (Gregoire Colin). Denis had grown up in Africa and so knew Djibouti from when she was a child. It was, in real life, the desert where the Legion undertook their training and it was imperative that they shot there. “It was mostly a deserted place,” she remembers. “Very few people living there… It was extremely beautiful. The strange beauty of this part of the world that didn’t exist anywhere else.”
The shoot was just four weeks and conditions were brutal in the desert — scorching and windy. “It’s so hot there that the camera is melting,” says Denis. “You can’t shoot video — it’s melting, too.”
There was a tight cast and crew of 15. And in a pre-cinematic TV world, the budget was tiny. At first, Denis and the crew expected support from the Legion, believing that this would help them overcome any financial constraints. “I thought to go to Djibouti with an extremely small budget was going to be impossible or crazy and I was thinking, ‘The real Foreign Legion and the army would give us trucks and tents and funds and uniforms.’” To Denis’ mind, all they’d need to fork out for was plane tickets. And then word came, a month before shooting began.
“The Foreign Legion decided not to help us,” she says, as they shared their gay porn suspicions. And they were prepared to do much more than simply withholding support and equipment. “They tried to stop us flying to Djibouti,” she claims. “The crew had to make everything: the uniform, the flags.”
In the end, they were assisted by the people of Djibouti but still the Legion persisted. “They tried every day to stop us,” she says. “When we were building the camp, they tried to destroy the camp. They were checking on us from the top of the hill with binoculars. Always watching us. They told us, ‘If you guys want to go in the nightclub, we break their face.’”
To prepare for their time in Djibouti, the cast and crew spent two months rehearsing in a studio in Paris, making sure each beat of choreography and action was worked out. Yet, though the four-week shoot ran to five (with two days in Marseille) and men watched them menacingly from hilltops, it’s something Denis looks back on with fondness. “[It was] a small crew, great actors, we were all so happy to do it. It was really exciting to do it!”
And what of the Legion, once the film was finished? “The Legion sent officers to the screening,” she says. “They didn’t talk to me but I heard that they were very moved.” She laughs. “They found out it was not a porn film… I was true to Billy Budd in my own way.”
A career doing things her own way, whatever the odds, would follow. The Claire Denis cinematic blueprint had been set by Beau Travail.
LE BEAU TRAVAIL IS OUT NOW ON CRITERION COLLECTION BLU-RAY