Men at work

>> Nice Work explores penis envy in the Foreign Legion

by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

 Using a French Foreign Legion encampment in Djibouti as her setting, Claire Denis retells Herman Melville's Billy Budd, a story of male jealousy run rampant. In Nice Work, Denis Lavant plays Galoup, an officer with an inexplicably obsessive hatred for one of the handsome new recruits.

 There's very little narrative here. Mostly, Melville's novella feels like a convenient box to throw a lot of stark, beautiful imagery into. Denis doesn't delve into the psychology of the characters (the legionnaires are basically indistinguishable from one another), but rather devotes much screen time to providing slow pans of the African desert. It's an expansive landscape that renders human activity--especially war games--petty and absurd. Denis offers a vision of the desert that vacillates between a natural paradise and a godless void where order must be maintained at any cost. As such, most of what we get of the human realm is imagery devoted to shirtless, well-muscled young men at play--fighting, hanging out their clothes and ironing. In bringing us the domestic side of the military rather than the epic, Denis creates a homoerotic slideshow of Kenneth Anger proportions.

 After a day spent in dress rehearsal for a war that doesn't seem to be happening, the boys head to the local dance club looking like ludicrous anachronisms in their white Foreign Legion caps. The locals check them out like they're watching Clowns Without Frontiers.

 When Galoup returns to France, we see him dancing to cheesy techno-pop alone in front of a mirror in a dance club. It's at this point that we realize the reason for Galoup's rage was staring us in the face all along: compared to all the other legionnaires, he's about as sexy as a piles attack. His spazzed-out mirror dance has echoes of Martin Sheen's Tai-Chi mental breakdown in Apocalypse Now, but in Nice Work, all inner turmoil has been replaced with straight-out cartoon pathos.

 Denis has created a slowly-paced film with little dialogue that is lush and tremendously moody; it just doesn't have the psychological nuance to allow a moment of unrestrained emotional abandon to open up onto deeper and darker mysteries of the human soul. :

 

 

Nice Work (Beau travail) opens Friday, January 27 at Ex-Centris