Generating Queer Possibility in Claire Denis' Beau Travail
Generating Queer Possibility in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail Beau Travail by Claire Denis is a elliptical, choreographic exposition of male military bodies in crisis. The militaristic order of the group crumbles when the leader, Galoup, begins to weaken his control because of his obsession with a young, handsome Legionnaire. The film is based on Billy Budd , Herman Melville’s story of the handsome sailor and his doomed innocence. Querelle , by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and based on the boock Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet, also draws inspiration from Billy Budd . While Beau Travail reveals the more tense and homoerotic relationships between the men that are festering under the surface, Querelle is completely frank in its eroticism and violence, existing as a space of uninhibited and vapid desires. These utopias of all-male, fraternal worlds have roots in the Western and Christian constructions of the patriarchal horde and the fear of, and desire to negate, the woman and the domest