Posting from vacation (hey, I'm actually in Canada at the moment), so this will be a two for one post so I'm caught up.
Beau Travail
Denis (1999)
“Maybe freedom begins with remorse.â€
We first get the tale in flashes — a dance club, a train, French Foreign Legion soldiers on a deserted and dusty plain (meditating? Tai Chi?). There is music and some chanting, but otherwise it takes a good six or seven minutes before anyone in Beau Travail speaks. It’s Galoup (Denis Lavant), speaking in the present. He was the leader of a group of Legionaries stationed in Djibouti. He was a consummate professional. He was. He longer is. Dismissed from the service, he narrates much of the rest of the film, which is the story of his disdain for one of his charges, Sentain (Gregorie Colin).
Djibouti is a dull assignment. There is a small social scene. As for work, save for a helicopter crash, treated as a brief flash with Sentain as the hero of the moment, most of the job is training. Running obstacle courses. Digging. Stretching. Tai Chi. They don’t say much. They’re animal-like. Denis has a languid camera, content to linger on the sweat and the swimming. Is this Galoup’s gaze? At some point it begins to feel that way. What is his beef with Sentain? I read the movie is a riff on Melville’s Billy Budd. As in that story the commander is jealous of the good looking and well liked underling. Also as in that story the underling strikes the commander. Unlike that source of inspiration, it is Galoup who is court-martialed. Punished with a long walk back to camp (and sabotaged with a malfunctioning compass), Sentain nearly dies.
Denis seems to put an exclamation point on it with an unexpected final scene of Galoup alone in a dance club, Corona’s Rhythm of the Night pounding through the speakers. He smokes, bobbing to the song slowly at first. As he begins to dance, the film cuts to the credits. After a moment, it cuts back and he’s in a full bore spastic, wild performance to the song. Is it too crass to call it orgasmic?
It takes a while for the pieces to come into place as the story hops around a little in time. Despite the 90 minute run time, the film is slow paced. I don’t mean that as criticism because it creates a certain mood. It’s easy to imagine a much more bombastic version of this tale in another’s hands. Not that there isn’t some flourish here. The soundtrack is equal parts disco and opera. It’s even a little spooky at times. Around the 30 minute mark there’s a scene of the soldiers carrying a man through an alley. They switch and carry Sentain. Galoup watches from a distance. It’s backdropped with a menacing synthesiser.
Ivan the Terrible (parts 1&2)
Eisenstein (1945, 1958)
“I will be terrible.â€
Ivan IV is coronated as the Tzar of Russia and his first decree seems to be — **** every body off. His announcement to unite the country and form an Army (forcing both the church and the rich to pay for it), is not well received to say the least. So begins part one of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. That opening scene sets the table for the next three-plus hours as Ivan attempts to rule amid a Shakespearean assemblage of cohorts and backstabbers determined to undermine and murder him. There is plenty of intrigue and plotting. He comes across as paranoid, but he really isn’t since everyone pretty much is out to get him. Ivan fakes his death at one point to weed out traitors. He goes into exile and comes back. Late in part two there is another fake death deception.
I’m so used to American epics, it’s always fascinating to see how artists in another country tackle their formative histories and tales. This one started off interesting. I only know the broadest strokes of Russian history so I was interested both in Eisenstein’s art and the actual story. But I have to admit this one drained me as it went on. The films unfold in what feel like a series of prolonged scenes many centered on ceremonies or performances or presentations. It rarely leaves the walls of churches and palaces, though the few times it does, it’s beautiful such as the shot of the caravan winding through the dessert (though the wall shadows were often great). I wanted more epic from this epic. Maybe that’s unfair? Normally I’m all for getting weird, but the stranger Ivan the Terrible gets, the more tedious I found it to be. Starting from the lengthy performance of the three children in the church though to the aunt singing a completely bizarre song to the weak-willed pretender Vladimir about a black beaver to the shocking switch to color and another prolonged musical number. Am I missing something in the (artistic) translation? Operatic for sure. I think Eisenstein’s silent film habits are a bit of an anchor here too. Maybe it was the style of Russian film at the time, but the constant stream of wide-eyed reaction shots became humorous to me pretty quick. Character speaks — the next 3-5 shots are characters around the room slowly reacting in shock.
Ultimately I don’t think I learned much. Funny enough, Ivan never seems truly terrible. Few in the movie are particularly likable, Ivan included. And I’m not the type of viewer who always demands someone be likeable. But the characters have to be interesting. This one failed on that front for me too. Just felt like a collection of wide-eyed expressions all grasping for power and not much else. I feel like I’d fail a history test on Ivan the Terrible despite spending the past three-plus hours with a (admittedly artfully done) biopic of him.
It’s a pair of films I’m glad I have seen to further my education, but I’m not sure I will revisit either.