The ending of Claire Denis’ Beau travail is one of the great moments in cinema, right up there with the dancing-chicken ending of Stroszek. In fact, the endings are quite similar: In each of them, the penultimate scene is a very restrained depiction of the protagonist’s implied suicide. (It’s left more ambiguous in Beau travail, but the connotation of suicide, either literal or figurative, is still evident.) And then, in each of them, the final scene comes as a sudden burst of frenetic song and dance. Both final scenes hence provide a direct juxtaposition that forms an integral part of the tone of the ending as a whole. The only substantial difference that I see is the difference in meaning(s) and pursuant emotional impact of the two scenes.
Before getting ahead of myself, I’ll point to the ending itself, which is handily available on YouTube. I think the scene in isolation, independent of the preceding film, is both mesmerizing and elating: the sparkling lights in the darkness, the music, and Lavant’s frenetic dancing are a superbly evocative and enigmatic mixture, and the cut to the credits comes at just the right moment. But it achieves its resonance by how well it concludes the film: the character was always locked in ritualized routine and in an alienated in-between state, and the film itself is always in kind of a nowhere-land of ellipses and distances; the ending serves as a sudden counterpoint in which the character and the film’s aesthetic are suddenly jubilantly free and of-the-moment.
The whole film is a study of distances and alienations: between the bright, vast, arid, yellow desert and the dark, cramped, lively, blue dance club; between the (male) Legionnaires and the (female) local citizens; between the rigid, baseless routine of the Legionnaires and the presumably more purposeful, utile actions of the women; between the nominal military purpose of the Legion and its actual role as pure ritual and performance; between the rigidly ascribed bodily movements of the military training and the anxious freedom of movement and interaction in the dance club; between body and mind, emphasized by Lavant’s internal thoughts and the visuals’ almost exclusive focus on bodily movements; between Lavant and the other Legionnaires; between the self-conscious, self-alienated, aged, unattractive Lavant and the simple (in the philosophical sense), whole, youthful, beautiful ideal of a Legionnaire, as represented by Grégoire Colin; and between Lavant and himself—self-as-body and self-as-mind, the ideal he wishes of himself and the version of himself that he views as the “real” one, the judging Being-for-itself (judging Colin, whom he initially says is unsuitable for the Legion) and the judged Being-for-others (judged by his own self, by the other Legionnaires, and especially by the godlike figure of his commander), etc. (Okay, that’s a needlessly long and repetitive list, but I can’t be bothered to pare it down now that I’ve written it.)
The film’s elliptical editing accentuates and itself represents these distances by eliding traditional connective tissues of narrative and character. The ending is a culmination of that structural technique, suddenly and explosively emphasizing the distance between many of the above elements—particularly between Lavant and the simple/united, ideal, free Self that he wishes he were. It is also foreshadowed somewhat by the earlier role of the dance club: a place where many of the distances were reduced, where the Legionnaires and women mixed, where their fixed, rigid roles were supplanted by something like freedom, where they had fewer roles and ideals to be alienated from. (Though in reality a dance club brings with it even more opportunities for such alienation, what with all those eyes upon you and their expectations of gender roles and dancing ability; but note that in the final scene, Lavant is alone.)
In short, I think that, just as the ending of Stroszek provides a potent symbol of the absurdity of existence, the ending of Beau travail provides a potent symbol of the ideal selves that we perpetually wish for but are perpetually displaced from. (Not that I wish to reduce either ending to those single meanings.)
Tags: alienation, Denis, endings, human body, intersubjectivity, movies, Self, Stroszek, structure
