Watch Anytime • Virtual Screening Room: BEAU TRAVAIL

BEAU TRAVAIL: New 4K Restoration
Available to your home theater through the Olympia Film Society
Streaming tickets now available!
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.
Dir: Claire Denis / 1999 / France / 93 min

“A masterpiece.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“Although the films of Claire Denis have always displayed a cool, vaguely hallucinatory appreciation of the surfaces of the world, none of this gifted French filmmaker’s previous work has prepared us for the voluptuous austerity of Beau Travail.” — Stephen Holden, New York Times