Lavant plays Galoup, the veteran leader of a troop of French Legionnaires. He might remind us of other military-movie hardasses, though there are small hints that there is something different about him. Like in the way he protects his own superior and elder, Forestier (Michel Subor), or in the delicate way he hangs up fresh laundry. The troop is stationed in Djibouti but there’s no apparent war or conflict that they’re preparing for, so we watch Galoup lead his young men through practice. They run an obstacle course, skittering under meters of strewn wire, pulling up from seven-foot-deep pits, vaulting over rows of beams set at varying heights. Afternoons are spent, unloaded rifles in hand, running through military formations in a hollowed-out fossil of a building. There are even nights out on the town, dancing and trying to get the attention of the local women. Time with the guys to build roads, do war games, and set up camp: sounds like fun, right? And maybe there was a time when Galoup used to actually enjoy all this.
"Time with the guys to build roads, do war games, and set up camp: sounds like fun, right?"
When a young enlistee named Sentain (Grégoire Colin) arrives, he becomes the receptacle of Galoup’s jealousy and resentment—and, looking a bit closer, also of his desire, affection, and reverence. We witness a lot of this conflict through Galoup’s reflective narration, his rather naked thoughts of ill will towards Sentain. And we witness it through expressionistic sequences of movement that blend dance with martial training exercises to make Beau Travail into something of a ballet. For instance, Galoup and Sentain, wearing military boots and pants but both shirtless, circle each other, and with each lap getting nearer into punching range, then into clinching range, and then into the range of an embrace.
Psychotherapist Terry Real writes: “Boys and men do not talk about being strong so much as not being weak. They do not list independence so much as not being dependent… Masculine identity development turns out to be not a process of development but rather a process of elimination, a successive unfolding of loss.” Perhaps it’s Sentain’s ease and openness and fluidity that Galoup resents. Or maybe it’s Sentain’s natural care for the men around him. Probably, it’s how Sentain won’t give up these qualities for the Legion the way Galoup did, and in fact shows a way to excel as a Legionnaire precisely through these qualities. Galoup tries to use Sentain’s goodness against him and get him ousted from the troop. Of course, this vendetta backfires and ends up getting Galoup court-martialled and shipped back to France, the military life he built becoming something of the past.
Back in Marseilles, Galoup reflects: “I screwed up from a certain point of view. Viewpoints count.” This thought comes to Galoup just before he steps off his balcony to scale a leafless end-of-winter tree, to prune branches and make room for new growth. I wish that for us human beings it were as simple as identifying which parts of us have lived past their use and can be separated with the swift swing of something sharp. But someone who deep down wants to change often doesn't make clear decisions but subconsciously engineers rupture, uses another person as an excuse. From a certain point of view, Galoup didn’t actively free himself from military service. Maybe he never would have left the Legionnaires if he hadn’t gotten fired. Maybe he would have gone on being that tightass, violent way forever. Either way, there’s a shift, a relief in Galoup’s body visible in the way he strolls the streets in this new civilian life. Galoup goes on: “Maybe freedom begins with remorse. I heard that somewhere.”
Not only was there great debate at the screening, the great debate was across generational lines. (One of my millennial cohort messaged me, “I’m happy you have young friends but I felt insecure and out of touch.” I told her, “Just like Galoup felt towards Sentain,” to which she replied, “Well, I didn’t hate them or want to fight or kill them lol.”) The young babies argued that Galoup’s dance was his fantasy just as he takes his own life. The moments before the dance sequence, after all, shows us Galoup alone in his sad apartment as he loads his military-issue handgun, a pan to a close-up of a vein in his arm pulsating. If that was the actual ending, then, yes, add this to the canon of movies about how manliness can box-in the entirety of a life, that canon of trauma-epics that guys love to fetishize on their Letterboxd. The movie goes on from there, though, and really ends on the opposite of Travis Bickle pointing his finger at his temple or Pvt. Gomer Pyle putting the end of his rifle into his mouth. Violence and self-immolation are the easiest of outs. Dancing like no one is watching? Now that shit is terrifying.
"Violence and self-immolation are the easiest of outs. Dancing like no one is watching? Now that shit is terrifying."
Galoup is in his mid-forties. It’s an age, in my current recent experience, where it can go a couple ways: one way being just carrying on and doing the same; another way is a crisis leading to a realization that even though you used to be a piece of shit, people can change. It means a lot to me to watch Galoup go the latter, take what he learned in Legionnaire life and combine it with the chaos in him that couldn’t be completely militarized away. When he slowly laps the dance floor, it’s that same stride when he and Sentain circled each other. When he jumps up and lands softly on his chest? Well, he knows how to fall from training all those takedowns, disarms, and throws. When he pops back up off the floor, think about that moment he showed Sentain how he wants those push-ups done. And the whipping back of his arms and head as the rest of him moves forward, that crouched spin, the rolling along the entire width of the dance floor? He’s dancing on his own but, come on, we know who’s on his mind as Corona’s Jenny B sings:
Won't you teach me how to love and learn?
There'll be nothing left for me to yearn
Think of me burn
And let me hold your hand