Beau Travail

Perhaps this is just film as artifact. It's beautiful like a vase is beautiful. The title, incidentally, means "beautiful work." It's hard to tell what the point of the whole thing is. And does it really need one? Like its source, Melville's Billy Budd, perhaps it is less concerned with making a specific point than with generating a light show of conflicting desires. The "murky rainbow" as Melville calls it. It's hard to miss the emphasis on the body in this film. Art is often presented as concerned with ideas. Here we are reminded that perhaps the realm of the coporeal is where we truly belong.