 A film in three minutes, Beaux travail. Is there an ideal you would dedicate your life towards? To a cause or belief that gave you a sense of purpose? A purpose you deemed good? How would you react if you realised that your way of life was nothing more than a rigid code from a bygone imperial age? Something that consumes all who live by it, provides community and brotherhood? Perhaps even love? But leaves those torn away from it with little else left in their lives. Because in Claire Dany's 1999 masterpiece Beaux travail, one soldier is about to make such a realisation. Loosely based on the unfinished novella Billy Budd by Herman Melville, Beaux travail or Good Works in English follows the career of French foreign legion officer Gallup, played by Denis Levin, who is stationed in Djibouti East Africa where he leads a section of young men under the command of commandant forestier. When a new recruit joins the unit, Santin, played by Grogoire Collin, Gallup develops an intense, all-consuming antagonism towards the soldier, leading him down a road of self-destructive paranoia as he plots his revenge. Told in a fragmentary style, Dany's approach to the film's narrative is more poetic than traditional A to B storytelling, with many scenes depicting the routine regimented life of the soldiers being shown in stylised flashbacks. Providing a rich contrast between the impoverished landscape of the former French colony to the humdrum modernity of Marseille. Dany's unique perspective on the lives of the men, shown performing traditionally feminine domesticated chores, is a portrayal of masculinity little seen in other films, and allows for plenty of moments of beautifully layered homosexual subtext between the story's three main characters. The several training montages were stylised and choreographed by ballet dancer Bernardo Monter, providing elaborate surrealist moments captured wonderfully by Agnes Goddard's stark cinematography, who photographs the barren exotic landscape of Djibouti from its endless dusty plains to its arid salt flats with a rawness that makes the European legionnaires only appear more out of place in this harsh world. Lavon is electrifying as the stifled obsessive Gallup. His killer-like stares and rugged pitted features heighten what is an intense sorrowful energy that is hard to forget when his determination to destroy Santan reaches its climax. As far as viewing experiences go, there is something truly hypnotic about Dany's direction that begs repeated viewing. Her poetic ballet of startling visuals combined with a meditative editing approach washes over you as the many layers of the repressed Gallup are slowly peeled back for us. With the character's journey into oblivion, hopefully making us pause and question the value we place in the self-perceived good works of our own lives in a world that sadly seems indifferent to whether or not we fail or succeed at them.