On the moral argument in Claire Denis's Beau Travail (1999) and what it reveals about cinema's relationship to the male body.

Beau Travail adapts Billy Budd to the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti and makes it primarily a film about looking. Denis and her cinematographer Agnès Godard shoot the legionnaires' training exercises with a quality of attention that is not sexualized but is profoundly physical. The bodies are objects of contemplation.

This inversion — men as objects of the gaze rather than its possessors — does something the film never announces. Denis is not making a point about gender theory. She's making a film. But the formal choice to look at male bodies the way male filmmakers have traditionally looked at female bodies creates an estrangement that is the film's richest resource.

The final sequence, which I will not describe, is one of the most astonishing in cinema. It arrives from nowhere and makes everything that preceded it feel like preparation for a single image. Denis has talked about the sequence in interviews and her description of why it's there is more interesting than any critical analysis.