Beau Travail and ‘Becoming’ Eveline Vondeling All my senses are awakened by looking at the film Beau Travail1 by Claire Denis. She depicts the asceticism and severity of the French Foreign Legion in the African desert with sympathetic and aesthetic pleasuring shots. They become along the time expansion of the film ‘one’ with their environment and besides the racial diversity of the group; their gender, age and clothing are questioning all kinds of conventions due to the ambiguity of representation. Their bodily behaviour, ballet-movements, rituals, the camera work and editing challenge all kinds of binary oppositions such as masculinity/femininity, dreamlike/real, naturalistic/figurative, childish/mature and present/ past. The latter is ambiguous since the spectator of the film listens to the voice of Galoup, a stiff, grizzled sergeant-major, who speaks from the position of the present, but the images one encounters are from the present (Marseilles) and past (filtered through his memory). The images seem never to be synchronised with his memories which gives the idea that like the past, the present self is also in a state of change, or rather in a state of becoming whereby his perception towards the past changes. Ronald Bogue argues in his book Deleuze and Guatarri, ‘we usually distinguish past and future by their relationship to the present, but if the present moment is a moment of becoming, then in a strict sense that present moment is also the past-becoming-present and the present-becoming-future.’2 The film stroke me by the metamorphosis of all subjects and the only consistency of change and becoming3. Therefore I will analyse their becoming throughout the film and question it trough the postcolonial framework. ‘My bastards are good kids’ commandant Bruno says while looking to them from a car. McClintock argues in her book Imperial leather: ‘nations are frequently figured through the iconography of familiar and domestic space’4. The Foreign Legion functions as an imagined community5, they follow the rituals and use the tangible objects6 to maintain the nation, the imagined community alive although de-colonialisation has found place, the ideal (French empire) is gone, only these forms of the ‘illusional truth’ are still alive. The imagination of the commandant, of the nation as a family 1 Denis, Claire dir. Beau Travail. Film. Paris: Pyramide Distribution, 1999. Print. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze and Guattari. Londen: Routledge, 1989. Print. p 30. 3 Becoming is difference from the self, coming out of the old state into a new. Coming out of the normal and or daily routine, like a metarmophose. Deleuze and Guatarri speak in several text about the bodily metamorphose and how a body is reacting towards external elements. 4 McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. p 357. 5 According to McClintock ‘Imagined communities are systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community.’ Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print, p 353. 6 Several tangible objects are depicted in the film that serve the idea of the nation. Such as the French flag and the army clothing. 2 !1 functions in this scene for a ‘natural figure of hierarchy’ between the father(head of the family) and his ‘kids’. Soon after this scene I encounter the ‘kids’ in a triumph carrying one another. Their environment becomes like a stage of a theatre together with the sound which gives me the feeling of ‘something to come’. It is the process of deterritorialization how Deleuze and Guatarri have intended the it7, and a new minority is in transformation. The Legion becomes in the next scenes more feminine by change of the former repetitive military training to the act of collective ironing, taking care of each other; things I connect more to tasks of the women. The camera shows Sentain female features; long arms, facial symmetry, high cheekbones, clear and smooth skin; or at least what is generally considered to be attractive about women. They learn each other French which could relate to the assimilation phase8. Normally this assimilation gives an authority of a language but the way Denis is using it, the assimilation brings them closer together, and gives the idea they start to form a new nation. After this scene they do a dance in the sea with knifes, an object I would interpret with violence but the dance is gracefull. A bomb explodes and this is when the camera work shows homoeroticism in the way Sentain is laying together with a boy after the bomb and are shown in close-ups, he also becomes a heroic figure which goes against the former hierarchy construction. Galoup starts to act towards his jealously towards Sentain, by punishing the Legion, an act to keep them in control. At this moment of the film the bodies are already performing multiplicities and their identity is difficult to capture, they are feminine, heroic, male, caring, homoerotic, gracious and strong. The next scene goes further in the state of becoming (postcolonial) since they are singing their native songs which relates to a sense of dignity for their own culture and going against the cultural assimilation of the colonizer. While meditatively peeling potatoes, Bruno and Galoup play chess and Bruno speaks the clear words; ‘I will pull through’. Back in the present becoming past, in Marseilles, I sense remorse in the words of Galoup, but not towards the Legion or the act of settlement, but because he can only remember mountains and desert but not “wild camels or shepherds appearing from nowhere or women in bright colours in fields of stone.’ Is he speaking about the cultural appropriation that he encounters from Marseilles? This appropriation is followed up by a hybrid ritualistic dance at a fire by the legion boys, they stopped doing military practices but practice rituals and movements in the envirionment, becoming 7 Deleuze and Guatarri have used the term deterritorialization to mark the new phase after a becoming towards the larger process which is deterritorialization. Different types of becoming are for example becoming women, becoming animal and becoming revolutionary. 8 I use the term assimilation how Franz Fanon revers to it in his book The Wretched of The Earth. The assimilation phase is the first phase in relation to nationalism where the native (intellectual) gives “proof” that he is assimilated the culture of the coloniser. For example the native intellectual who starts to write in the French language (to become also recognised). !2 one. The most remarkable scene before the total transformation is the animalesque scene between Galoup en Sentain. They move around each other protecting their territory, ready to attack, not like playing a dog, or any imitation, but an absolute deterritorialization of the human-body. The next scenes are implicated with ballet movements of the legion in the environment, you never see the whole, but the camera is showing fragmentations, their dance reminded me of the film; Besouro9 in which capoeira10 becomes a graceful revolutionary fight against the colonisers. The fragmentation becomes clearer by observing the subjects trough a mirror in a disco which gives a literal sense of absolute crystallisation of the body. By analysing the film I found two main consistencies of becoming, that is: the becoming of Galoup who has an individual struggle and the becoming of ‘genderless, multiple, sameness and one with the environment’ from the legionnaire as a form of resistance. These two are not all the time opposites of each other, because both are in a state where there is no consistency, the ideal is gone but the form is still there; the French settlement. This makes their position to each other, especially in the beginning of the film, ambiguous. They are all leaving their old state of being coloniser or colonised, to become postcolonial. This state is mainly challenged due to the idea that nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Denis is depicting the Legion becoming genderless or perhaps queer, multiple, animal and the same, to become finally their environment. Where these old powers of gender hierarchies within the Legion and the idea of difference work against Galoup who wants to keep the hierarchy of difference and authenticity alive. References Assunção, Matthias Röhrig. Capoeira The Brazilian Martial Art. Psychology Press, 2005. Print Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze and Guattari. Londen: Routledge, 1989. Print. Denis, Claire. dir. Beau Travail. Paris: Pyramide Distribution, 1999. Film. Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of The Earth. trans. London: Penguin, 1963. Print. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. Tikhomiroff, João Daniel. dir. Besouro. unknown: Mixer, 2009. Film. 9 10 Tikhomiroff, João Daniel. dir. Besouro. unknown: Mixer, 2009. Film. Assunção explains in his essay Capoeira The Brazilian Martial Art that Capoeira ‘provided enslaved Africans with a practice that was no longer restricted to any specific ethnic group, but open to all of them, and allowed them to incorporate some of their own specific traditions into a neo-african form.’ p.186. He also explains it was for the Brazilians runaway slaves an imitation of movements of wild animals. In this account it really fits with how it is used in the film because this is the moment the Foreign Legion becomes one despite their ‘racial’ differences and becoming one as capoeira also works as a sort of dialogue, reacting towards each others movement. It is not an imitation, like is also the case in Denis film. !3