Beau Travail

Claire Denis made Beau Travail in 1999, her seventh feature, loosely adapted from Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and shot in Djibouti where Denis had spent part of her childhood. The film was widely regarded as a critical breakthrough; it appeared on most decade-end lists of the late 1990s and has since climbed into the highest tier of Sight & Sound's all-time poll, sitting at number seven in the 2022 critics' chart.

Galoup (Denis Lavant), a Foreign Legion sergeant in postcolonial Djibouti, looks back from civilian exile at his obsessive jealousy of a young soldier, Sentain, who has earned the favour of their commanding officer. Denis sets the everyday rituals of the Legion (calisthenic drills, ironing of uniforms, washing of bodies) to Benjamin Britten's opera, and to the volcanic landscape of the Horn of Africa. The film is closer to dance than to plot; Lavant's performance is choreographic in the most literal sense, culminating in the famous solo dance sequence to Corona's The Rhythm of the Night.

Denis's collaboration with cinematographer Agnès Godard produced one of the most distinctive visual languages in European cinema, sun-bleached, tactile, attentive to bodies in heat. The film is also a quiet study of colonial echo, of male desire under military codes, and of the kind of obsession that no longer needs an object.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Denis's masterpiece and one of the great achievements of post-1990 European cinema, a film that proved narrative drama could operate almost entirely through bodies, light and music. The ending alone is among the most extraordinary scenes ever filmed.