Film Reviews by None

Do not look for a dialogue or a 'proper story' in The Intruder: the film relies on elliptical and fragmented narrative where the remnants of a repressed past seem to constantly threaten to disturb the present of the protagonist. The film resists conventional narrative approaches keen on explanations and psychological classifications. It does not describe situations and conflicts in order to find solutions. The actors are not provided with personalities that justify all their actions. In the way characters and story become freed from pre-established codes and causalities, the film combines aspects of modernist fiction and of philosopher and film theorist Gilles Deleuze's concept of a 'time-cinema': time and the visual do not simply function as codes to allow the easy unfolding of movemnt and action towards a logical end. Time and the visual become the actual texture of the film. This film, therefore, fails to meet many of the expectations of more conventional work. Nevertheless, a story can be recuperated in The Intruder: a man constantly dreaming violent scenarios while he waits for a heart transplant, the murder of a young intruder in his home, his escape to Tahiti to find one of his sons, whilst rejecting the other one who lives around the corner from him. The complexities of human life...

The film evokes France's colonial past (it is filmed in Djibouti) and it is a sum total of Claire Denis's thoughts on isolation, exile and post-colonialism. It questions received ideas about collective identity, be it national, colonial or patriarchal, questions that are worked through in the elite military force of the French foreign legion represented in the film. Beau Travail focuses on image rather than dialogue, but the music is never just a background: it helps compose a rich and sensual cinematic world. There is also the issue of political engagement in its referencing of one of its main sources: Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit soldat, 1960. The association of Beau Travail with Le Petit soldat is made clear through Michel Subor's presence as the commanding officer Forrestier, Thirty years before Beau Travail, Subor played a French deserter also called Forrestier in Godard's film which was an evocation of the effects of the Algerian war. Denis's stylised approach to the image should not be confused with a glorification of colonialism but rather an investigation of the myth of the legion: while she reveals its seductions, she simultaneously uncovers the systematic disavowal of identity as difference and the denial of its own obsolescence which are necessary for its continued existence.