SEA Film Club – ‘BEAU TRAVAIL’ by C. Denis (1999)

Devang Vaidya

is a person-centred existential therapist based in London. His research interests include Kierkegaard studies for tracing the existential origins of person-centred therapy, and the presence of aesthetic irony and ethical pathos in moments of therapeutic transformation.

“What does brute, autocratic power find intolerable? Seeing love being shared freely and spontaneously amongst equals. Adapted from Benjamin Britten’s opera, which in turn is based on Herman Melville’s novella ‘Billy Budd’, Claire Denis’ Beau Travail gives a lyrical portrait of a man who falls prey to the intense forces of envy, resentment, and malice. The master of physical acting Denis Lavant plays Sergeant Galout, a French army officer stationed on coastal Djibouti with a group of young soldiers he is responsible for training. The arrival of a new legionnaire, the young and beautiful Sentain, leads Galout to plotting a diabolical scheme that brings dire consequences.”

Art and aesthetics are inseparable from life, they are intrinsic parts of it in fact, and films are powerful expressions of the many facets of the lifeworld and of experience. They have the power to change our lives.

The SEA Film Club aims to address the question of aesthetics and art in the understanding of being human and of psychotherapy within the context of our prevailing separatist worldview in which art and aesthetics are segregated from education/work – the former trivialised as mere entertainment and spectacle, and the latter regarded as the important and serious business of life.