How Bernardo Montet Infused Beau travail with His “Choreographic Thought”
Few directors capture bodies in motion with the sensuous intensity that Claire Denis brings to her work. In some of the most memorable scenes in her filmography, she invites viewers to linger in moments where her characters lose themselves in the pleasures of dance: in U.S. Go Home, Grégoire Colin bops around in his bedroom to the Animals; in 35 Shots of Rum, an ensemble of actors (including Mati Diop) slow-dances to the Commodores’ “Night Shift”; and in Let the Sunshine In, Juliette Binoche blithely sways solo to Etta James’s “At Last.” But never has rhythmic movement been more central to Denis’s filmmaking than in her masterpiece Beau travail (1999), a bold reimagining of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor that follows a French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) and his obsession with a young recruit (Colin) against the backdrop of a Djibouti desert landscape. The repressed desire at the heart of the film comes to life thanks to the vision of French dancer-choreographer Bernardo Montet, who appears in the film and was tasked with finding a troupe of nonprofessional dancers, including a few real Legionnaires, as well as creating the training routines and imbuing them with psychological drama.
Ahead of our recent release of Beau travail, I phoned Montet, who lives in Paris, to find out more about his artistic practice, his experience working with Denis, and how the film’s famously explosive ending came to be.