25 years later: 'Beau Travail' was a woman's take on an all-male world

Claire Denis loosely adapted Melville's 'Billy Budd' to make one of the most acclaimed films of the new century.

There’s a moment I’ll always associate with Claire Denis’ Beau Travail: I moved to New York in the summer of 2000, fresh off four years of college in which I was a Film Studies minor, reviewed movies weekly for the college newspaper, and felt like I Knew My Shit when it came to cinema.

A few months later, when the Village Voice released its annual film critics poll for the year 2000, I looked at the results and realized that it was dominated by films, mostly from around the world, that I not only hadn’t seen but had barely even heard of.

It was a humbling moment, for sure, to see the likes of Yi Yi, The House of Mirth, and The Wind Will Carry Us, all of which had escaped my radar. I think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and probably Dancer in the Dark, were the only ones in the top ten that I had seen by that point.

And #1 on that list was Beau Travail, Claire Denis’ very loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s 19th-century novella Billy Budd, which transported the action to the French Foreign Legion, in Djibouti, in the modern day or somewhere close to it. The film, while it premiered at film festivals in 1999 and is often listed as a ’99 release, debuted in the U.S. at the end of March 2000, 25 years ago next week. However, I didn’t see the film for the first time until much later.