I soon realized that “Beau Travail” was a variation on Melville’s fable of repression and violence. The injection of Britten’s languidly surging music into a balletic ceremony of sun-bronzed legionnaires disoriented me further, as if one dream were invading another. Also uncanny was the music that rumbles on the soundtrack, shortly after the film begins-a sailors’ chorus from Benjamin Britten’s opera “Billy Budd,” an adaptation of the eponymous novella by Herman Melville. That journey had been so far outside the range of my usual experience that, later, my memories of the place felt unreal, and, when I saw Denis’s wide shots of arid mountains and lush seas, they worked on me like flashbacks to a lingering dream. I knew only that the movie was set in the East African nation of Djibouti, which I had visited not long after the film was made. Claire Denis’s film “Beau Travail,” a luminous tale of desire and despair in the French Foreign Legion, had an uncanny effect on me when I first watched it some years after its release, in 1999.
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