If you are addressing power dynamics in your art, a good place to set scenarios in is a military context. There is a built-in component of control in every aspect of martial discipline. What one wears, eats and how one’s time is spent, is all carefully prescribed from the top down. It is a rigid system that is built to keep power in the intended hands. But as with all systems that rely on human nature, there are factors that can subvert any system of control. One of the most reliable of these is desire. No matter how rigidly an officer enforces the rules, their heart still wants what their heart wants.

Claire Denis doesn’t suffer fools. She spent her formative years in Africa where her father was a civil servant. He was more sympathetic to the local population than the colonial powers that placed him there, and made a point of changing his post every two years, so that his children would learn the geography of the continent. The lack of cinema in the places that Denis grew up in caused her to come to her craft later than most filmmakers. When asked why she chose cinema, she explained that she is unfit for anything else. She got her start as an assistant director to filmmakers Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Jacques Rivette. When an interviewer called her a protégée of these directors, she asked them if they’d use that word with a male assistant director.

Beau Travail is set in the French Foreign Legion outpost of Djibouti. It is loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same name appears in the soundtrack), in which a soldier becomes wildly beloved by his fellows, causing his superior officer to view this adoration as a threat to his authority.

Denis’ depictions of Legionnaire exercise regimes are based on observations of actual training. They might be described as the section of a Venn diagram where Vanessa Beecroft and Tom of Finland intersect. As Denis stated: “Cinema cannot exist except through eroticism. The position of the spectator is like a kind of amorous passivity and hence highly erotic.”

Aside from the officer’s suppressed lust, the film mostly depicts soldiers going about their drills, ironing their uniforms and generally killing time. The contrast between the urgency of the officer’s lust and the soldiers’ languid routines makes many of the power plays of the officer seem even more irrational and hysterical. The sum of its parts makes this film a perfect study of power dynamics.