Born in France, she was raised in several countries in Africa, where her father served as a colonial official. This idea of nonbelonging, in both an exterior and an interior sense, is a theme and a feeling that traverses Denis’s cinema, and is shared by the filmmaker herself. She wished to explore not only the experience of being a foreigner in an unfamiliar land but also what it meant to be (in her words) “a foreigner to oneself.” She set the film in the present day and centered it on a group of French Foreign Legionnaires stationed at a coastal outpost in the former colony of Djibouti, in East Africa.

Commissioned by the French television channel ARTE to make a film for a series on “foreign lands,” Denis gently bent the rules in order to take up an expanded theme-that of foreignness. One of these tensions can be found in the origins of the project. This wide-ranging response, from disparate corners, perfectly suits this work that holds in balance a rich and resonant set of tensions and contrasts. theatrical run-only the first of many surveys on which it has featured prominently-and inspired an outpouring of writing in internet cinephile spaces, film magazines, and academic journals alike. Quickly, Beau travail acquired a passionate following in film culture, was voted best film of the year in the Village Voice critics’ poll in 2000, when it had its U.S.

When Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999) first appeared on American screens, the critic Stephen Holden used a striking phrase to capture its embracing of bold opposites: “voluptuous austerity.” His characterization, widely quoted since, illuminates the film on many levels, and also forecasts something important about its reception to come.

Bordwell film