Boys and girls

Beau Travail -- and Chutney Popcorn

Don't ask, do tell. Gays in the military, that's the story of the moment, from the kid on this summer's Real World who introduces his soldier boy to his MTV roomies to Nagisa Oshima's Taboo at Cannes, the saga of a samurai in 1865 Japan who goes for a cock-teasing recruit. And homosexuality, neither named nor acted upon, leaps between the lines of Claire Denis's Beau Travail (opening at the Coolidge Corner this Friday), an inspired retelling of Billy Budd relocated to a North African post of the French Foreign Legion. In this extraordinary film -- for me, the best of the year so far -- homoeroticism screams out in every studly frame.

The Billy Budd-like object of desire is a new recruit, Sentain (Grégoire Colin), who is eyed with both attraction and hostility by the Claggart-like Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), a grizzled veteran. To Galoup's horror, Sentain, whom he considers too thin for the service, is well liked by the other legionnaires. Still worse, Sentain is looked on with favor by the Captain Vere-ish commander, Forestier (Michel Subor), who even flirts with him a bit. That's too much for Galoup, who becomes insanely jealous because he goes unappreciated by the commander he worships.

In Iago-like outbursts, Galoup plots via voiceover to bring young Sentain down, to make the innocent boy suffer. Meanwhile, life goes on at the post: marching, exercising, going into town to check out the African women who sway at the disco.

Denis once told me that even when she was a child (she grew up in French colonial Senegal), her chief curiosity was about what males were doing. Chocolat (1986), her first feature, was an autobiographical tale about a white girl's intense relationship with the family's proud African male servant. Since then Denis's obsession with penetrating male culture has been the subject of three brilliant features. What, she asks, are men up to when women aren't around?

No Fear, No Die (1990) follows two young Africans in Paris as they toil in the virile underworld of cockfighting. I Can't Sleep (1993), also Paris-set, takes her viewers into the head of an African serial killer. With Beau Travail, Denis spends boiling desert days and intimate nights again in the company of men. What's new for her is the ever-present eroticism: stripped to the waist, her guys are cheesecake-beautiful.

Lots of screen time passes without dialogue as we get wondrous scene after scene of the lads doing their calisthenics in ritual preparation for some unknown future battle. Comparisons with Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Olympia are inevitable. Rather than criticize Riefenstahl's aesthetics (Susan Sontag has done that, and brilliantly), Denis adapts them for her purposes: making male bodies pulsate, depicting on screen the sensual appeals of militarism. Are her Leni-stepping legionnaires meant to be regarded as neo-Nazis? I don't believe so. In Beau Travail's post-colonialist world, they are a lost-patrol subculture, as irrelevant as Green Berets. With their Kiplingesque bravado and intractable "Charge of the Light Brigade" mentality, these guys might as well be guarding the moon.

When I interviewed Harmony Korine recently, I asked him about his movie favorites. "Denis Lavant," he said immediately. Who? I'd seen Lavant act in several pictures (Lovers on the Bridge, etc.), but I'd never thought about him. My mistake: he's one of the great film presences in the world, this tiny, wired, pockmarked actor who stars as Galoup. When Beau Travail ends in a kind of disco limbo, seeing Laval's lithe dancing to "Rhythm of the Night" is like suddenly coming across Jimmy Cagney tapping away in Yankee Doodle Dandy. Revelatory!

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There's no more distressing proof of the cowardice of independent distributors than their shunning of Chutney Popcorn (it'll be at the Brattle all week), which was written and directed by and stars a talented ex-NYUer, Nisha Ganatra. Can there be a cuter dyke comedy than this one, which keeps its lesbian integrity while coming out with a feel-good story that has almost mainstream appeal?

Ganatra plays Reena, an Indian-American who lives in NYC with her model-like girlfriend, Lisa (Law and Order's Jillian Hennessy), and makes a living taking photographs of henna-tattoo'd women. Her Lilith Fair-like equilibrium is shattered when she's accused of selfishness. So she determines to have a baby for her barren, newly married sister, Sarita (Sakina Jaffrey). Altruism, though, has consequences. Sarita is jealous because her husband's sperm is being used; Lisa isn't thrilled to help with the impregnation (the "turkey baster" scene), and neither does she look forward to the bumpy next nine months. Has flaky Reena acted egotistically again? The comedy is handled deftly, and there's a scene-stealing performance by Indian actress Madhur Jaffrey as Reena's mom. Ganatra is fine in the lead, charmingly unkempt, an anti-model role model of an indie protagonist.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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