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Dance

The Final Scene of Beau Travail

Denis Lavant

Exactly what happens at the end of Herman Melville’s final novel, Billy Budd, is ambiguous. The basic gist is that a sexually repressed master-at-arms on a boat in 1797 can’t deal with the emotional turmoil that another male sailor’s beauty has inspired in him, and so lies to the boat’s captain about mutiny and gets stabbed. Melville ends the novella with three chapters that show how the master-at-arms’ repressed emotionality made him a tremendously unreliable narrator: everything he presented about his reality was guided by feeling, how envious he was of the other man’s beauty.

What happens at the end of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail—an adaptation of Billy Budd, set in Djibouti—is equally ambiguous. Sergeant Galoup, played by Denis Lavant, is courtmartialed from the French Foreign Legion because of some harsh disciplinary action he took against another soldier. The Legion—which is as tightly knit, violent, and homoerotic as any group of physically active young men can be—was Galoup’s life, and without it, he’s bereft. The movie is ninety minutes of doom and woe, Djibouti disco, men doing calisthenics on the beach to Benjamin Britten, a march across a desert landscape to a Neil Young’s “Safeway Cart”—and it ends with a dance.

Where Melville upended Billy Budd with factual unreliability, Denis does it with pure physicality. A few things worth noting happen in the available YouTube.com excerpt of Beau Travail’s ending. First, a shirtless Lavant makes his bed with maniacal army precision. The task finished, he sits down with his thoughts, and in his mind’s eye, sees all his army friends posing on the beach with guns. He’s alone now, with time to kill. He pulls out his own pistol, lays down on the bed with it, and rubs it against his body. Maybe he’s about to shoot himself. Suicide is implied. But instead, during a shot of a throbbing vein on Lavant’s arm, Corona’s 1993 Eurodance banger “Rhythm of the Night” begins to play.

While it plays, the shot cuts to Lavant, standing alone next to a mirror inlaid with lasers. He’s smoking a cigarette. He teases out small movements with a hand, takes a few steps, and traces the basic shape of what he’s about to do—and then does it.

Describing the dance with words is possible, but ridiculous: Lavant’s body does the talking. He is an actual acrobat with circus training. He is a spiny man with a craggy face who director Leos Carax has perform crazy gymnastic shit in most of his movies. Claire Denis said: “In an early draft of the screenplay the dance fell before the scene where he...