Beau Travail

Ever since I saw this film, whenever I iron my clothes or make my bed and there is like some huge grotesque crease in the middle of my shirt or my bedding is not fitted correctly, I think about how I'd probably never survive a day in the French Legion
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Claire Denis unveils the psychosexual racial rot infesting colonial domination more masterfully than anything I’ve come across in recent memory.

In Beau Travail, 35 Shots of Rum, and Chocolat, Denis did something that, and I really hate making these sort of broad overgeneralized statements that feel like they could never be logically valid or True since they make claims with words and phrases that are incredibly difficult to support like “the most” but I’ll say it anyway, constitutes the most remarkable exploration of race, colonialism, sexuality, history, eroticism, and phenomenology I’ve ever seen in film. It makes me believe in the promise of a film that does have the capacity to use story and narration and visual affect to reveal concepts and ideas about the human condition that we a priori accept but we never knew we accepted. I think after seeing Sinners, I was a bit skeptical—does film really have the ability to create a robust and meaningful discussion of power and all its manifestations? After revisiting this film, I’m revitalized in believing that promise is not completely empty.

I feel like I’ve really gained a newfound appreciation for this film after my fourth viewing, and it is uncanny and odd to feel like a film grows with you— I think back to myself when I last saw this film versus who I think I am now, and I would be really surprised if I recognized what I saw tonight a few years ago. It’s I think a quality that really characterizes all of the films I’ve given 5/5 stars— films that feel like they’ve grown with me or that change something deep within me after each viewing.
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Random list of thoughts

— The Hegelian master slave dialectic or lord bondsman dialectic, where the worker, while in a dominated position in relation to a dominating master, through labor, through a material engagement with other workers, through kindness and communal bonding, through impromptu jazz that cacophonizes with each person entering and exiting the rumbling sound as they feel inside themselves, begins to gain something the master does not have access to: the ability to know that you have the ability to do. To materially move and shift and change your surroundings, that labor has a capacity reserved for and characterized by consequence, that one through one’s labor has the ability to instill change and meaning, something the master is unable to understand. That hands hold inside them potentials that you don’t know you don’t know.

— French psychosexual ownership and entitlement of the colonized Other

— A masculinity defined by breaking beyond the boundaries, laws, and limits set by the Father, where the fruits of liberation from freeing oneself from the Father’s discipline and control, e.g. property rights and privileges granted via the state, are to be enjoyed in their fullest capacity by the newly established generation of Brothers (aka Freud and Oedipus).

— That the psychoanalytic understanding of patriarchy in French society, explained by Joan Scott, rests on a perception of women as objects to produce desire and pleasure in French men through an assumption that “seduction” is part of the French national character. And, that by breaking beyond the disciplinary control of the Father, a Father that regulates what are deemed to be understood as legible modes of bondage and sexual character, the patriarchy frames women and heterosexual excess as the prize or gift or award for transcending that control that severely regulated sexual behavior and enjoyment through the discourse of taboo, respectability, and prudishness. That women, in other words, are under the patriarchy, the fruit that are waiting in the tree for men to enjoy after the newest iteration of patriarchy transcends the authoritarian rule of the Father that disciplines and limits sexual enjoyment.

— That what I wrote above about French men framing women as the fruits of liberty and freedom becomes confused and complicated when confronted with difference, with peoples not aligned with a fetishized notion of Frenchness-as-innate-essence. Joan Scott’s book Politics of the Veil is very helpful for understanding this. That the Hijab is interpreted and read and theorized in French society as a garment that both runs contrary to French notions of secularism and supposedly restrains the French patriarchal construction of masculinity

— The look on the Djiboutian women’s face as she stood there, waiting for a French man to come and approach her as she danced, looking like this was not something she really wanted to do at all, where there was a look in her eyes that she didn’t really want to dance and entice French soldiers toward her, but she continues to dance anyway— the silent and often muted horror of the colonial enterprise: that colonized women ought to be sexually accessible and available for the colonizer. Relates to the wartime sexual abuse of Bangladeshi women by Pakistani men during the liberation war — women as sexually accessible for enjoyment by the colonizer. 

— The thing I learned in my class on France and Islam about how Napoleon Bonaparte and other French colonialists believed muslims were easier to colonize due to Islam’s belief in total submission to Allah, where such a submission was conflated with the idea that muslims as a whole were a “submissive” population open to colonial uplift, a people that needed a master. Connects back to the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

— That a routine, a practice, like praying 5 times a day or performing military exercises or attending a gym or going on walks every day at 7:30 at night after doing math for two straight hours or staring at birds in the park while listening to Grouper every morning or saying I Love You to a loved one whenever you talk to them— that these routines build a texture and rhythm to daily existence that we might lean upon but not fully recognize that we are leaning upon them.

— Sylvia Wynter and an analytic of flesh. Hortense Spillers and the way Black flesh and skin does not get the privilege of being understood as violated upon infliction, whereas those with ownership of whiteness have historically been granted the privilege of having bodily violations be considered and understood as unacceptable. Gratuitous violence and Orlando Patterson—the whole interrelated foundation of race, sexuality, and colonial histories that structure how we understand what counts as “pleasure”. Evident in the film through the engagements between French Legion soldiers and Djiboutian women.