For those of you unaware that Herman Melville was queer at heart and that his novella Billy Budd bristled with same-sex tension, just browse the indispensable The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage. Here Robert K. Martin notes: "Billy Budd, the 'new' homosexual, is a victim of everyone around him. Too beautiful, too 'rosy,' too androgynous, he cannot offer an effective alternative to the masculine authority of the ship." Out of necessity, he was hung. With a rope, that is. 

This novella -- which has already inspired Benjamin Britten's 1951 opera with a libretto by E.M. Forster, plus the superb 1962 film directed by Peter Ustinov and starring the beyond gorgeous Terence Stamp -- has now taken hold of Claire Denis, who's no newcomer to quirky homosexual subject matter (e.g. I Can't Sleep). What she has done here is landlocked the once-seaborne Billy Budd. 

Now set in the east African enclave of Djibouti, Melville's sailors are members of the French Foreign Legion. This brigade of wired-up testosterone is being ruggedly trained nonstop. They must crawl under wires and climb hills, plus swim and fight, all of which they do in a mostly shirtless and sweaty state. 

Their trainer, the sullen, tightly muscular Sergeant Galoup (Denis Levant), a man with a bite worse than his bark and a face only a mother can love, suddenly sees his isolated and controlled world come unhinged with the arrival of a new recruit, the quietly heroic Gilles Sentain (Grégorie Colin). Galoup instantly becomes obsessed with this young man ("I felt something vague and menacing take over me") and sets out to destroy him. Of course, the Galoup/Sentain coupling mirrors the Claggart/Budd pairing, so don't expect a finale with a gay wedding in Vermont. 

But do anticipate being overtaken by one of the most gloriously homoerotic features to greet the new millennium: Men in uniform. Men halfway out of uniform. The sun constantly beating down. And plenty of passions that are never sated. 

Beau Travail winds up being a minor classic made from a minor classic, and that's no mean feat. 

--Brandon Judell 

Source : Obtained from Movie Homepage