BEAU TRAVAIL screening at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Claire Denis | 1999 | France | 1h32m | Presented in the original French audio with English subtitles

BEAU TRAVAIL is one of the great films about masculinity ever made, and one of the clearest studies of how male ego begins to break when it can no longer command the world around it.

Director Claire Denis takes the outline of Herman Melville’s BILLY BUDD (the same Melville who wrote MOBY DICK) and relocates it to the French Foreign Legion in East Africa, where Sergeant Galoup looks back on the arrival of a younger recruit whose presence unsettles him more than he can admit. The plot is spare. The emotional life of the film is rich. Denis builds it out of drill routines, glances, posture, heat, skin, dust and withheld feeling, until discipline itself starts to look like a mask for jealousy, desire and humiliation.

A large part of the film’s stature comes from the precision of its construction and from where it sits in Denis’s career. By 1999 she was already a major filmmaker, but BEAU TRAVAIL fixed her place in modern cinema in a different way. Agnès Godard’s cinematography gives the film its severe sensuality, and Denis Lavant (who is also starring in HOLY MOTORS later this week) gives one of the defining performances of contemporary French cinema, not through speeches or psychological explanation, but through physical tension, ritual and collapse.

The Legion setting is important too. Denis takes the Legion - a structure associated with order, obedience and masculine control - then shows how fragile that order really is once vanity and resentment enter the frame. Few films explore so well how masculine authority often masquerades as testosterone-driven theatre, and what looks solid from the outside may already be disintegrating within.

You should come and see BEAU TRAVAIL because it changed the terms of what a war-adjacent film, a literary adaptation and a film about men could look like at the end of the twentieth century. Denis isn’t interested in military action as spectacle, and she couldn't care less about with patriotic mythology. The film's power lies in the way it strips masculinity of grandeur and reveals how much of it rests on performance, hierarchy and fear of exposure. That is one reason the film has had such a long afterlife in cinema culture, and why its final sequence remains so famous. It turns repression into movement, and private defeat into one of the most unforgettable endings in modern film.

LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.

HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter Bazari Orbeliani via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left to the first floor. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/