12/08/22 (Thurs)
In Claire Denis’ disjointed 1999 film, Galoup, a sergeant in the Foreign Legion in Djibouti who basks in the imagined approval of his commander, is upset when an unwitting rival enters the picture after heroically saving victims in a helicopter crash. The kid is young, muscular and effortlessly good looking, and seems to stand above and apart from the usual misfits that make up the Foreign Legion (such as a less attractive Russian who seeks to join). When the commander learns that the boy was abandoned as a baby and found in a stairwell, he shrugs and mutters approvingly, “It was a good find,” upsetting Galoup even more. Galoup’s obsessive jealousy at thinking himself displaced in his commander’s affections leads him to take action against the kid: seizing the chance when he catches him giving water to a fellow soldier who is being punished, he takes the boy out into the desert, gives him a broken compass, and dumps him in the middle of nowhere. The consequences prove severe for everyone.
The film, based loosely on Billy Budd, has an unmistakably homoerotic feel with plenty of shirtless men and suggestive camerawork from start to finish, though Galoup’s motivations are left ambiguous: he could just as well be upset at the thought of being usurped power-wise as taken by the kid’s otherworldly beauty (or, for that matter, the commander’s masculinity). Still, the inclusion of music from Britten’s opera Billy Budd suggests that the director knew very well what she was doing. The idea of a all-too-beautiful interloper disrupting the military order is reminiscent of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Nagisa Oshima’s Gohatto, but those are more straightforward and compelling in story terms.
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