In the Basement

After directing a series of more accessible narrative features, including Import/Export (2007) and the highly celebrated 2012 Paradise trilogy, Viennese auteur Ulrich Seidl decided to return to his more cinéma-vérité oriented roots with the delightfully debasing and quaintly stylized 80-minute quasi-documentary Im Keller (2014) aka In the Basement, which has been advertised as “A Film Essay” and was made over a five year period where the auteur searched all over Austria for his country's most ‘cinema worthy’ basement environments. Undoubtedly, with the Josef Fritzl scandal that emerged in April 2008 where a seemingly normal Austrian old fart was revealed to have kept his own adult daughter imprisoned in a secret corridor in his basement for 24 years and regularly raped her in a seemingly unreal real-life horror scenario that resulted in the birth of seven children and one miscarriage, it is no surprise that Seidl would direct a film about spending time in the most conspicuously quirky and peculiarly personalized of arcane Austrian lairs. It should be noted that in his official statement on his personal website, Seidl wrote regarding the film, “The basement in Austria is a place of free time and the private sphere. Many Austrians spend more time in the basement of their home than in their living room, which often is only for show. In the basement they actually indulge their needs, their hobbies, passions and obsessions. But in our unconscious, the basement is also a place of darkness, a place of fear, a place of human abysses.”  For those familiar with Seidl’s somewhat singular oeuvre, In the Basement has more or less the same laid-back, free flowing and ostensibly structureless structure as the filmmaker’s early classic Tierische Liebe (1995) aka Animal Love, albeit it focuses on the basements of eccentric people as opposed to the pets of eccentric people. Of course, just as Animal Love does not solely focus on people getting down and dirty with their beloved doggies, In the Basement is also set in places that transcend the damp, dark, and dirty abysses in the subject's homes. As someone that lived in a windowless basement room for a number of years and did many things down there that most people would not do in any place, Seidl’s work had a somewhat more personal resonance for me than any of his other works, though, in terms of domestic absurdity, I do not think I can compare with most of the things the aberrant Austrians do in their secret cellars in the film. Indeed, as I personally discovered, the basement can be a calming and soothing place where one can lose themselves and forget the world exists, but too much time down there can be highly psychologically deleterious as most of the subjects of In the Basement insightfully, if seemingly unwittingly, demonstrate. Featuring a soft-spoken so-called gun nut of the philosophically Weiningerian and opera singing sort, a suburban tuba-playing Hitlerite of the dipsomaniac sort who fantasizes about living in Austria’s glorious past from the relative comfort of his meticulously decorated mensch-cave, an elderly reborn doll pseudo-mom who keeps a number creepy rubber babies hidden in boxes around her cluttered basement, a rather repulsive female masochist who has a tendency towards getting her husbands stabbed or imprisoned after sustaining one too many brutal beatings, a grotesque fat and bald male slave who regularly has heavy weights applied to his testicles by his equally repugnant mistress-cum-wife while washing dishing and doing other emasculating wifely duties, and a couple more subjects that truly make one wonder if Austria would have been better off if their most infamous prodigal son Uncle Adolf had won the Second World War and erased anti-Aryan figures like Freud from history, Seidl’s deranging doc is another almost perniciously potent remainder why the auteur describes himself as a, “director, scriptwriter, producer, voyeur, misanthrope, cynic, social pornographer, blackguard, provocateur, pessimist, and humanist,” on his personal website. 

 Fritz Lang might like lurking in dark corners like his famous filmmaker namesake, but I sincerely doubt that he has a negative view of technology as depicted in Metropolis (1927). Herr Lang owns and operates a state of the art underground shooting ranging where, in between operatic singing sessions and rants about how he would have been good at singing the “great in-between roles” in operas, he plays a sort of unsimulated version of the old school NES game Duck Hunt that involves shooting projected images of men with real loaded weapons. As expressed by his strangely eloquently delivered monologue, “A man is always young and trim. For him time stands still. Meanwhile his wife will age. Pointless to express outrage or mourn her youth or shed tears, in truth. For what’s left of her days as she helplessly decays while he, with vigor blessed, beats on his heroic chest. He feels again his vigor grow, his manhood stiffens down below. Whenever a lass he spies, a superman, he feels with pride since ere the world began its highest principle is man,” Lang has probably spent some time reading Nietzsche and tragic Jewish Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger’s magnum opus Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) aka Sex and Character. Of course, Lang’s friends are no less ‘politically incorrect’ as demonstrated one man’s remark regarding the dubious loyalties of an Austrian-born Turk, “He says, ‘I’m Austrian.’ I go, ‘Sure, but at the European Cup you scream ‘Turkiye, Turkiye!’ He says, ‘Yeah, I’m Austrian, but I’m Turkish.’ You see? But he’s more Turkish. Even if he was born here.” The man also complains of, “100,000 Turkish malcontents screw our girls if they’re blondes in miniskirts” and his fat friend concurs, adding, “And they proudly declare, ‘We’re fucking your women!’ As men that agree that Muslims have historically raped the women of their enemies as a form of psychological warfare and make their own women sport burkas because they are “Jealous, insecure men,” it is easy to see why these guys would hang at Lang’s shooting range, as they seem to expect a race war of sorts, especially with the growth of illegal immigration and rape in Austria.  Although Austrians, Lang's friends are merely echoing the thoughts that most honest and normal white men in the West have.  While Seidl's own political views are dubious at best (he contributed a segment to the largely worthless anti-Jörg Haider agitprop piece Zur Lage: Österreich in sechs Kapiteln (2002) aka State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters), he dares to depict Austrian society at it's least sanitized, thus making him a sort of heir to Pier Paolo Pasolini, albeit without the gay gaze.

 While Josef Ochs—a man that shares the same exact name as an infamous SS-Obersturmführer who was involved in the deportation gypsies and was present in the Berlin Führerbunker during the last dark days of Hitler—does not talk candidly about the Muslim menace like Lang and his comrades, his basement is a sort of lavishly decorated National Socialist shrine that features various framed portraits of Uncle Adolf, a couple models dressed in different uniforms from the Third Reich era, and various other forms of Nazi memorabilia that are probably quite hard to come by in the contemporary Aryan world due to the strict anti-Nazi laws. Of course, Ochs does not just love the Führer, as he also has framed portraits of Richard Wagner, his patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and various other important Germanic historical figures hanging on his garage wall that demonstrate that he has deep Austro-Teutonic roots and feels like he is part of rich and deep culture and tradition that goes back many centuries. For nearly two decades, Ochs has been taking yearly pilgrimages to Germany to visit the Führer’s headquarters at the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden and, as a result, the Stasi-esque kraut police (which he accidentally describes as, “The Gestapo”) have put him on a watch list, or so he complains in a half-annoyed/half-joyous fashion. On top of his Führer fetish, Ochs is a hardcore tuba player that plays in a brass band with his comrades, who he regularly drinks with in his quaint Nazi dungeon where they discuss the good old days when one could be prideful of being Austrian and taking part in Germanic cultural traditions without being labelled a “Nazi” by some emasculated brainwashed cultural cuckold or sapless ethno-masochistic xenophile. As some might assume considering he is an old dude that spends a lot of time hanging out with his friends in his basement, Ochs is also a self-confessed alcoholic, with the subject revealing regarding his daily drinking schedule, “I do like my drink. It goes hand in hand with playing. It’s a given. A morning break drink. Before that, three spritzers just so I can talk. Then, with the morning break drink, 10 spritzers. And afterwards a few shots, because everything’s gone so well. But I’m predisposed because my whole family drinks.” Indeed, if there ever was a greater plague to the Aryan people than the ideas of Hebraic culture-distorters like Marx and Freud and their intellectual spawn, it is alcohol. 

 While there are other subjects in the doc that certainly come close, masochistic lard ass Gerald ‘love slave’ Duchek and his proudly sadistic ‘mistress’/wife Alessa are probably the most innately repugnant individuals in the film, as their exceedingly sloppy and sub-homely physical appearances are only transcended by their seemingly senseless sexual habits, which seem to involve everything aside from actual sex. A totally bald and rather heavyset man who may lack hair on his head but is a virtual bear when it comes to the rest of his burly body, Gerald works security at a local fancy theater by day, but when he comes home he becomes a ‘love slave’ who is forced by his pink-haired Wal-Mart-esque wife to clean the entire house while completely unclad (sans various torture devices attached to his flaccid genitals) and crawling on all fours like the figurative swine that he is. When stoic she-beast Alessa urinates, she forces her anti-hunk hubby to lick her festering vag clean and he even thanks her for the orally odious opportunity. As Alessa candidly states regarding her S&M marriage with anti-gentleman Gerald, “I absolutely adore my love slave…And the opposite is also true: He worships me. It doesn’t affect our love – on the contrary. Only with total devotion and love can something like this work. If I don’t have absolute trust in this person…And similarly if he doesn’t have trust in me, his mistress, he can’t let go completely and can’t serve me 100%. It’s a huge sign of trust. Of course I’m aware that I’m responsible for everything here and that can only work if it’s based on absolute love.” When Gerald first began his relationship with Alessa, he was forced to always wear a chastity belt and was allowed nil form of sexual release, but now that their darkly obsessive romance has evolved he is allowed to masturbate when his proudly wicked wife gives him the get-go. While debauchery occurs all around the Duchek house, the basement, which has been transformed into a dungeon that puts any of the settings described in Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s classic S&M/BDSM novella Venus im Pelz (1870) aka Venus in Furs to abject shame, is where the real hardcore depravity occurs. On top of having a luxurious cabinet full of fancy strap-on dildos and butt-plugs that Alessa uses to peg and prod her beastly beloved's bunghole, the dungeon features a makeshift torture device where poor perennial cuck Gerard is lifted off of a table by his testicles, thus causing him to bring new meaning to the slang phrase ‘blue balls.’  While they are unquestionably grotesque people that do grotesque things, it is nothing short of undeniable that Gerald and Alessa are made for one another and seem to share a mutually loving and joyous romance where both of them are able to express their unfortunate sexual idiosyncrasies.

 Notably, spliced randomly throughout In the Basement is footage of an unnervingly eccentric old woman named Alfreda Klebinger, who is, among other things, the proud ‘mother’ of a number of lifelike vinyl dolls called ‘reborn dolls,’ which over the past couple of years or so have become a strange trend among certain lonely woman of the Occidental world who seem to have a maternal urge that they cannot fulfill because they are too old to have children or have some sort of other problem (it is believed the some women use reborn dolls a means of grieving a child that has died). Why Alfreda collects the dolls is never actually mentioned, but it is glaringly obvious that she is too damn old to get pregnant and have a baby of her own. For whatever reason, Alfreda keeps the dolls hidden in cardboard boxes around her basement. With her hubby, Alfreda has apparently traveled all around the world and while baby talking to one of her reborn dolls while pointing at a large world map, she states regarding India, “It was so filthy, he [her husband] didn’t like it either.” Like Alfreda, a rather rotund hunter named Manfred Ellinger that is featured prominently throughout doc has also done a lot of traveling around the world, though he has regulated most of his time to the Dark Continent to hunt exotic animals, which he proudly describes as managing to kill with a single shot and include mostly furry creatures like nyalas, waterbucks, kudus, white-tailed gnus, warthogs, jackals, and bonteboks, among countless others. Naturally, the taxidermied heads of Manfred’s prized kills have been mounted to his basement wall, which looks fairly absurd due to how many eclectic animal heads of varying sizes have been concentrated to one small area. Surely not the stereotype of the Hollywood-esque wasteful white expedition hunter, Manfred describes how he has personally eaten virtually all these animals, even getting his wife to make Wiener Schnitzel out of a warthog, though he admittedly refuses to dine on baboon. Undoubtedly, to some degree, Manfred reminds me of the expedition hunters that Austrian avant-garde auteur Peter Kubelka mocked in his classic experimental documentary short Unsere Afrikareise (1966) aka Our Trip to Africa, which almost certainly had to be a major influence on Seidl. 

 Undoubtedly, Seidl’s doc is also notable for featuring the most morbidly obese yet happy hookers in cinema history since the ones that briefly appeared in David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990). One of these unpleasantly plump women, Cora Kitty, describes how she decided to become a professional pussy-peddler after getting fed up with having to be nice to nasty people while working in retail, which she absolutely loathed like any sane person would. The conspicuously corpulent prostitute makes no lie of the fact that she absolutely loves her job of selling her gash for cash as it gives her the distinguished opportunity of regularly meeting many different types of men, including guys with big and little cocks, as well as dudes that shoot mighty and miniscule loads. Cora Kitty is depicted engaging in a sort of pap smear-esque session of cunnilingus where her body is strapped into a gynecological device with a small and weasel-like weakling with a rather fitting pervert mustache who is apparently able to please many hookers, who apparently let him enter their meat-curtains for free because he has a special talent where he is able to bust a powerful load where his cum splashes over the gal's thoroughly used and abused vaginal walls, or as the creepy fellow explains himself in an autistic monotone fashion, “My potency lies in, as I discovered at some point, that I can shoot off a very powerful load of semen. With it I’ve left many women pretty amazed.”  Indeed, he may be a rather pathetic looking fellow, but the tiny mustached man certainly must have a special talent if he is able to get call-girls and bar-hogs to spread their legs for free.

 If there was one subject in In the Basement who rubbed me the wrong way the most, it is a self-described “masochist” named Fraud Sabine who is featured having heir ass and pussy lips whipped by a fairly old and racially Alpinish fellow named ‘Master Walter’ aka Walter Holzer who sports a prized pair of lederhosen while brutalizing the old broad's bum. Notably, the nearly elderly masochist, whose beat up body is far from a wonderland, goes on to describe how she stabbed her first husband because she got fed up with him regularly beating her and later she had another hubby imprisoned for four years after he got too rough with her. Somewhat curiously but not surprisingly considering her own background, Frau Sabine is a Caritas Internationalis aid worker who provides help to battered Catholic women. Undoubtedly, Sabine has an unhealthy fetish for exceedingly abusive men, but one cannot help but wonder if there is a little bit of closeted sadist in her in that she would stab one hubby and ruin the life of another. It seems that the masochist hooked up with Master Walter as a means to control her voracious appetite for pain in a more safe and controlled environment where deadly violence never comes into play.  Arguably, the most bizarre thing about Frau Sabine is that she seems like someone that could be an office manager at some sort of bureaucratic corporation, so it is not exactly a pleasure to see her unclad saggy derriere being whipped by Master Walter in a mostly lackluster fashion.  Notably, towards the end of the doc, while getting wasted with his brass band comrades, basement Führer Josef Ochs makes the hilarious official declaration while in an exceedingly inebriated state, “I am the Führer of this party.” Of course, the doc would not be complete without Mistress Alessa having her swinish love slave hung from his balls. As demonstrated by his ambiguously erect choad, pig Gerald most certainly wallows in the punishment. 

 As can be expected in a so-called democratic modern European nation like Austria, In the Basement subject Josef Ochs was apparently facing being charged with ‘Wiederbetätigung’ (a supposed act of (re-)engagement in National Socialist activities) after the film was released as a result of the Nazi memorabilia he has in his suburban Führerbunker. To auteur Ulrich Seidl’s credit, he has pretty much only had good things to say about Herr Ochs, who would later complain that the director opted to focus especially on his Nazi regalia instead of the various portraits and memorabilia that he has in tribute to figures like Ludwig II and various Austrian noblemen (it should be noted that Ochs never actually makes any pro-Nazi statements). Although I have not gotten the chance to see it since I have yet to find a copy with English subtitles, there is a seemingly worthwhile documentary entitled Ulrich Seidl und die bösen Buben (2014) aka Ulrich Seidl: A Director at Work directed by Constantin Wulff that depicts the legendary ‘Seidl method’ as the filmmaker works on both In the Basement and the play Böse Buben/Fiese Männer for theatre. As Ochs’ remarks demonstrates, Seidl is by no means a ‘documentarian’ (which is a label that he himself thankfully rejects) in the conventional sense, as it is quite clear he stages and highly stylizes his cinematic scenarios, which most certainly depict real people doing what they love best, albeit from a highly subjective perspective where the filmmaker manages to add his own somewhat subtle and oftentimes cynical social criticism via the way he opts to direct and edit a particular scene. In that regard, Seidl is like an Aryan equivalent to conspicuously kosher confederate arthouse carny Harmony Korine, whose masterful directorial debut Gummo (1997) implemented a similarly highly stylized approach to documentary-like scenarios (of course, Korine's film also features a number of completely fictional scenarios).

 It should be noted that In the Basement features a couple scenes where Austrian teens do banal things in their basements like have less than chatty parties where they drink and smoke in a particularly passionless fashion like automatons who have seen one too many Hebraic Hollywood frat-boy scat-comedies. Indubitably, compared to their elders who love lurking in a cement abyss of the ‘ungeheuer,’ the teens seem to be totally lacking in character and individuality and are assumedly completely out of touch with their ‘Heimat,’ which one can only assume is the result of the deracination of Austria via Americanization.  After all, these kids not only have a glorious historical past, but also tons of great contemporary filmmakers to enjoy like Seidl, Michael Haneke, Michael Glawogger (RIP), Peter Kern, Paulus Manker (who surely needs to get back into the directing game), Markus Schleinzer (who undoubtedly made the ultimate Austrian basement feature with his debut Michael (2011)), avant-gardist Peter Tscherkassky, Gustav Deutsch, and various others who remind one that even a small European nation can have a more artistically important and intriguing film industry than the global cinema gatekeepers of Hollywood.  If there is anything that one can learn from In the Basement, it is that the Viennese Aktionists look like a bunch of hopelessly bourgeois art fag posers when compared to the basement-dwelling proles in Siedl's film who do what they do for the mere pleasure and not to make of spectacle of themselves. Indeed, Seidl might by a sort of distant cinematic descendant of Aktionist filmmaker Kurt Kren, but he seems to have long realized that there is more intrigue and idiosyncrasy among seemingly normal everyday people than narcissistic ‘artiste’ types who seek attention for attention's sake. If In the Basement gave me any insights into how unbelievable dungeon crimes as committed by sinister individuals like Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Přiklopil could have occurred in Austria, it is probably the rampant social alienation that is caused by so-called democracy, capitalism, and multiculturalism, not to mention the fact that unity inspiring movements like nationalism and especially pan-Germanism have become quite taboo as a result of the defeat of the Third Reich during the Second World War.  Indeed, when it is illegal for a man to own a portrait of a national historical figure in his home, there probably has to be some sort of collective psychosis in that country.  While Fritzl pathetically attempted to blame his singularly sick behavior on the discipline he learned as a child during the Nazi era, his actions undoubtedly seem like those featured in a Weimar era newspaper or Fritz Lang flick.  Luckily, Austria still his fine folks like the Fritz Lang featured In the Basement.

-Ty E

Beau Travail

Since I have been on a strange and completely unexpected Claire Denis (Chocolat, Les salauds aka Bastards) kick lately that has led me to the natural conclusion the fairly unconventional auteur is easily the greatest living female filmmaker, I decided that I would stoically bite the bullet and finally watch the film that has been described as her magnum opus, which is, thematically speaking, not exactly the sort of film that one would expect to be directed by a woman yet, at the same time, it could have only been directed by a member of the fairer sex who has an unabashed love of hard yet sculpted male bodies as many of the director's other works demonstrates.  Indeed, Beau Travail (1999) aka Good Work is undoubtedly a somewhat curious masterpiece for a heterosexual female as it tells the somewhat subtle and even esoteric story of a French Foreign Legion master sergeant of the latent homosexual sort who is fanatically obsessed with his fellow latent homosexual commander and decides to wage a personal war against a new young soldier who catches the attention of his forbidden love object. Of course, as her work J'ai pas sommeil (1994) aka I Can't Sleep especially demonstrates in a refreshingly uncompromising way, Denis seems to almost have a fetish for pretty poofs and never shies away from male nudity and glorifying the male body, so I was not all that surprised that she would direct a largely choreographed work where muscles and testosterone take center stage to the point where most of the young legionnaires do not even have credited names.  While Denis' work certainly tells a story and a somewhat arcane one at that, the film is largely populated by what one might describe as living statues in the form of young Adonis-like soldiers who incessantly expose their bodies for both the protagonist and the viewer.  Unquestionably Beau Travail is the greatest film on macho militarized homosexuality since Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 swansong Querelle (incidentally, Fassbinder included a quasi-S&M-oriented Legionnaire scene in his early masterpiece The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971)), as it manages to express testosterone-driven homoerotic passion in an innately subtle and nuanced fashion without depicting a single scene of gratuitous buggery or even homo kissing.  To some extent, the film feels like a deconstructed western where all the savages have been killed or otherwise pacified and where the John Wayne character has created an imaginary enemy in his mind because said enemy has caught the attention of the old cowboy he loves most.  Of course, Denis’ film is also like a French arthouse take on the underrated closest queen commando classic The Sergeant (1968) starring Rod Steiger and to a lesser extent John Huston’s all the more underappreciated and reasonably bizarre Carson McCullers adaptation Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Aside from its strong crypto-cocksucker theme, Beau Travail is also loosely based on Herman Melville's posthumously released unfinished 1888 novella Billy Budd and makes reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s once banned work Le Petit Soldat (1963) aka The Little Soldier, with Michel Subor playing a character with the same exact name as that of the character he portrayed in the pro-commie anti-Algerian War flick. Of course, as one can expect from a Claire Denis flick, Beau Travail features certain racial and political themes about the legacy of colonialism, like the patent absurdity of attempting to mold negroes into ‘Frenchmen’ so that they will persecute their own black brothers in the pursuit of promoting the three-headed dragon of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” Denis’ film is also notable for featuring what I would certainly describe as one of the greatest and strangely uplifting endings in cinema history.  Indeed, after watching Denis' film, you will never look at a suicidal sod or middle-aged military officer the same way again.

 It would be a lie to not immediately reveal in a review of Beau Travail that the film is largely comprised of long scenes featuring healthy young soldiers with toned bodies doing redundant military drills and exercises in almost ethereally scenic locations. The ‘gay gaze’ that the filmgoer is subjected to is that of introverted protagonist Galoup (Denis Lavant of Leos Carax of The Lovers on the Bridge (1991) and Holy Motors (2012)), who is a master sergeant in the French Foreign Legion that secretly lusts after his elderly yet surely elegant commander Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor). As Galoup lovingly states regarding Forestier in a way that hints at his love interest's repressed homosexuality, “Bruno. Bruno Forestier. I feel so alone when I think of my superior. I respected him a lot. I liked him. My Commandant. A rumor dogged him after the Algerian war. He never confided in me. He said he was a man without ideals, a soldier without ambition. I admired him without knowing why. He knew I was a perfect Legionnaire, and he didn’t give a damn. Bruno. Bruno Forestier.” Indeed, like Forestier, Galoup uses his military authority as a reason to sit on his ass and somewhat creepily stare at young and buff men all day long.  In fact, Galoup and Forestier's scoptophilia is so obscenely obsessive that they actually delight in watching their men do emasculating things like ironing their uniforms. As Forestier proudly says while shamelessly gawking at his soldiers, “We’re taught elegance in and under our uniforms. Perfect creases are part of this elegance.”  A non-linear work that is partially set in Marseille after the protagonist has been forced to leave the French Foreign Legion, Beau Travail centers around Galoup narrating the story about his long and undying unrequited love for Forestier led him to murderous jealousy when a young recruit named Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin of Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain (1994) and Denis’ Nenette and Boni (1996)) joined the Legion and soon caught the Commander’s attention and affection. Galoup even has a sense of foreboding upon first seeing 22-year-old twink Sentain for the first time, or as he reflects via narration in a fashion that makes him seem somewhat like a pathetic paranoiac, “One day, a plane from France dropped off some new guys. I noticed one of them that stuck out. He was thin, distant. He had no reason to be with us in the Legion. That’s what I thought. I felt something vague and menacing take hold of me.”  Of course, little did poor Galoup realize that Sentain would ultimately become the most beloved and soldiery member of his little frog brigade.

 The French Foreign Legion is in Djiboutis and while there are plenty of young colored gals that are more than willing to fuck for a candy bar, the soldiers spend most of their free time with each other, with Sentain at the lead as a natural alpha who has great empathy and loyalty for his compatriots. While talking to a negro driver named Ali during a night in Ramadan, Forestier remarks regarding his soldiers, “My bastards are good kids” and then proceeds to describe himself as a sort of surrogate father to the soldiers. When Ali rhetorically remarks, “Guess how much a colored girl costs here,” Forestier jokingly yet somewhat awkwardly replies, “You’re a pain, Ali,” adding,“ If it weren’t for fornication and blood, we wouldn’t be here. That’s all.”  Meanwhile, Galoup becomes increasingly agitated about the new recruit, complaining to himself like a little bitch, “Sentain seduced everyone. He attracted stares. People were drawn to his calmness, his openness. Deep down, I felt a sort of rancor, a rage brimming. I was jealous.” Of course, Galoup is as loyal to Forestier as ever as demonstrated by remarks like, “Here I am, Commandant, like a watchdog, looking after your flock,” but that ultimately changes when the protagonist dares to mess with the Commandant's favorite ‘son.’  When a freak helicopter accident happens that kills a fellow named “Pierre, the Corsican,” both Forestier and the troops develop a seemingly impenetrable respect for Sentain, who manages to save another Legionnaire (played by blond beast Nicolas Duvauchelle of À l'intérieur (2007) aka Inside and Denis’ White Material (2009)) from drowning, with Galoup somberly complaining, “It was then that Sentain’s heroism came to the fore.” When Galoup attempts convince Forestier that Sentain is a traitor and that “he has something up his sleeve,” Forestier, who has developed a deep passion for the young mensch, becomes agitated and gives the protagonist a firm warning not to fuck with his best boy by stating, “Careful what you’re saying. Backstabbing isn’t in the Legion’s honor code.” Naturally, it is really Galoup who has something up his sleeve and he will do anything to take down Sentain, including potentially causing him to suffer a slow and painful death.  Despite Galoup's jealousy of him, Sentain is actually an orphan from a humble background whose appearance abandoned him as an infant. Notably, when Sentain informs Forestier that he was “found in a stairwell,” the old queen Commandant expresses his fondness for him by replying, “Found? Fuck! At least it was a nice find.”  Of course, Forestier never expresses such affection for Galoup, who might as well be a ghost as his presence his negligible at best.

 Ultimately, Galoup decides to attack Sentain by persecuting his comrades in the hope that he will go over the edge and attack the protagonist, who plans to dish out the ultimate punishment to the poor unwitting orphan boy. Indeed, Galoup harshly punishes a negro soldier for “abandoning his post” after he goes to pray with some fellow black Muslims. When Sentain dares to attempt to give the punished negro a cup of water while he is tediously digging ditches as punishment to the point where his hands are bleeding profusely, Galoup knocks the cup out of his hand and stares at him in a threatening fashion. When he complains, “That’s unfair, sir” and Galoup slaps him, Sentain instinctively punches him in the face, which is exactly what the protagonist wanted him to do as it gives him the opportunity to use punishment against him as a means to liquidate him. As punishment, Galoup drives Sentain many miles away to the middle of a desert where the young Legionnaire is left with nothing but a backpack and a compass and is forced to find his way back to the base. While Sentain acts passive-aggressively towards Galoup upon being dropped off by remarking, “I’ll see you soon, sir. Says hello to Commandant for me,” he does not realize that the protagonist has something up his sleeve. Of course, before dropping Sentain off, Galoup broke his compass so that he cannot find his way back, with the protagonist even bragging to himself like a militaristic mad scientist regarding his sinister scheme before hatching it, “You’ll be sorry, Sentain, believe me. I see what you’re up to. We don’t need guys like you here. You’re in my power. I will destroy you. I’ll set my trap. The compass.” Naturally, Sentain soon gets lost and begins rotting in the desert while his unit assumes that he has fled to Ethiopia, but Galoup is soon found out when the Legionnaires go to a tribal trading post and a negro soldier named Tierno notices that a young black boy is selling the MIA soldier’s broken compass, which was found on a salty white beach. When Forestier summons Sentain to punish him upon learning of his treacherous behavior, the protagonist says to him, “Admit you hate me for it,” but he responds simply by stating in a stoic fashion, “You know the rules. You knew what you were in for. You have no choice now. Repatriation for disciplinary reasons. Court-martial. You’ll be convicted. Your Legion days are over. All over,” thus leaving the disgraced master sergeant to feel all the more rejected by the man he loves most.

 While Sentain is found half-death and unconscious by some tribesmen, his fate is questionable and it is never revealed whether or not he reunites with his Legionnaire comrades. Before going back to France, Galoup hangs out with a young negress that he seems to think is his girlfriend as demonstrated by the fact he buys her gifts and is featured lying shirtless in her bed, though he is never actually depicted even so much as kissing her, let alone pounding her brown puss. With nothing left to live for and becoming a pathetic and craven disgrace in the eyes of his one true love, who he will probably never see again, Galoup decides to end it all and kill himself upon moving back to Marseilles. Indeed, upon obsessively making his bed like a true anally retentive queen as if it matters what his bed looks like after blowing out his brains all over the sheets, Galoup lies down (notably, with a tattoo on his arm reading “Serve the good cause and die” being shown prominently shown) and prepares to blow his brains out. In a simultaneously hilarious yet strangely humorous twist ending, Galoup is depicted smoking a fag like a suave fag in a dark club and then dancing by himself to the revoltingly kitschy song "The Rhythm of the Night" by Corona in a scene that the seems to reflect the character’s triumph of loneliness and, as Denis one described in an interview, his figurative, “dance between life and death.” 

 In his essay on the film entitled Unsatisfied Men: Beau travail, Jonathan Rosenbaum—probably the only living American film critic whose opinion I respect to some degree—notably wrote, “I know it sounds fancy to say this, but the difference between Claire Denis’s early work and BEAU TRAVAIL is quite simply the difference between making movies and making cinema.” While I do not totally argue with Rosenbaum’s remark as I think he underrates and/or is confused by a lot of her other work (notably, he complained in the same essay that Denis' film I Can't Sleep discomforted him because he felt it, “seemed to wallow in a kind of professional morbidity”), I have to admit that Beau Travail is indubitably Denis’ most innately immaculate, effortlessly poetic, and emotionally penetrating work to date. Surely, one will not find another film that combines the ‘body worship’ based homoeroticism of Leni Riefenstahl, the tragic and self-loathing yet macho and militaristic faggotry of Yukio Mishima, the pathological moodiness and landscape lyricism of Michelangelo Antonioni, darkly erotic avant-garde choreography in the spirit of Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1989),  and the intricate sexual and racial critiques of Fassbinder. Admittedly, I would usually question that intent of any heterosexual woman that dares to direct either a war film or virtually any sort of cinematic work about male homosexuality yet, like with virtually all of her films, Beau Travail demonstrates that Denis is simply intrigued by and can relate to idiosyncratic people, especially of the hopelessly lonely sort, and can find something to like and loathe about all sorts of people, even latent cocksuckers of the lovelorn sort who act murderously malicious as a result of becoming jealous like petty teenage girls. While the film undoubtedly features antiwar themes and mocks militarism in general, Denis’ work is not like your average Hollywood war movie and thankfully does not feature sappy and emotionally manipulative sentimentalism like a big tough guy crying like a little girl after seeing his friend's head blow off. Instead, Denis seems to argue that the military is best run by a bunch of thoroughly sexually repressed closet queens who will accept nothing less than an all-male environment full of super spiffy and well ironed uniforms and bulging biceps, among other things. 

 Unquestionably Denis is a master of eloquent doom and gloom and in nowhere is this more apparent than in Beau Travail, which notably ultimately ends on a startlingly bittersweet and even joyous moment where a perennially lonely self-loathing fag’s self-slaughter is curiously celebrated as the last big act of a man that lived inwards and had a complete and utter incapacity to express himself outwards. In that sense, the film acts as a sort of antidote to the pseudo-arthouse posturing of fashion designer turned would-be-auteur Tom Ford’s obscenely overrated debut A Single Man (2009). Judging by her work, I can only assume that Denis is a lover of lonely losers and her obsession with this quasi-archetype is one of the reasons why Beau Travail is so particularly potent as she was able to make viewers of various stripes be able to identify with one of the most curious of men. When it comes down to it, Beau Travail is the ultimate tragic Männerbünde romance and a work that could be used as a recruitment film for a sort of neo-brownshirt Sturmabteilung, as it demonstrates that staying in the closet can lead to the most major of male sins, including treachery and dishonor, among other less than soldierly qualities that are more oftentimes associated with the feminine realm. Notably, Fassbinder once stated that one of the reasons that Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was so important to him was because it inspired him to totally embraced his homosexuality lest he turn into an evil mensch as a result of repression like the antagonist Reinhold Hoffmann of the book, or as the auteur wrote himself, “...this reading helped me to admit to my tormenting fears, which were almost paralyzing me, my fear of my homosexual longings, to give in to my suppressed needs; this reading helped me avoid becoming completely and utterly sick, dishonest, desperate; it helped me avoid going under.”  Of course, the protagonist of Denis' film pays the ultimate price as a result of being dishonest with both himself and his comrades.  Maybe if the protagonist of Denis' film had seen Fassbinder's 15½ hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) adaptation, he might avoided the French Foreign Legion altogether and simply started frequenting a local cruising spot.  Personally, after watching Beau Travail and seeing all the various African woman sporting exceedingly flamboyant tribal sheets and lurking at kitschy clubs where absolutely abhorrent Afro-pop is incessantly vomited out of the speakers, I can see why homosexuality might become prevalent among the Legionnaires.  Of course, as Beau Travail makes quite clear, Frenchmen probably should not be in Africa in the first place but of course, as the post-poetry life of Arthur Rimbaud and countless other famous frog poets and artists demonstrates, the Dark Continent and third world in general has always been a homo haven of sorts where white aberrosexuals who were not able to escape from their minds and sexual desires were at least able to physically escape to a place where bourgeois mores were nonexistent.  Indeed, while I do not think Denis' film blames crypto-homos for colonialism, it does make it quite clear that it was restless loners, rejects, and orphans were more likely to leave their homeland behind and travel to strange lands where the native women might lead an otherwise heterosexual man to homosexuality. After all, there are not many black women that can say that they are as pretty as Beau Travail star Nicolas Duvauchelle, which is something Denis seems to agree with as her casting of him in various sexual and unclad roles fairly clearly demonstrates.

-Ty E