The Complexities of Exile, the Other, and the Postcolonial Predicament in Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Abstract

Cáit Murphy argues that Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) expresses an “accented style,” citing Hamid Naficy’s theorization of accented cinema in his 2001 study, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Drawing on Denis’s own exilic background, Murphy analyzes the depiction of contradictory exile in Denis’s film. Working from Naficy’s criteria for accented cinema, such as epistolarity, cultural hybridity, and Bakhtinian chronotopes, Murphy argues that the film’s protagonist Galoup (Denis Lavant) and the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti are paradoxical representations of belonging and Otherness.