Loosely based on Herman Melville’s unfinished novella Billy Budd, and featuring music from the Benjamin Britten opera, Claire Denis’ film inverts the usual male gaze of the cinema to offer a cool, female study of men. Though there is an obvious under-current of homoeroticism, particularly in the physical exercises of the squad of French Foreign Legionaires in the arid desert of Djibouti, we are never quite sure what motivates the senior NCO Galoup, played by Denis Lavant, in his jealousy and ill-feeling towards the young recruit Sentain, played by Grégoire Colin.

At the heart of the plot is a triangular relationship between Galoup, Sentain and the commanding officer, Forestier, played by Michel Subor, but the dynamic between them is less obviously sexual than driven by status and favouritism, which exemplifies the literally regimented nature of the Legion but also suggests parallels with the colonial attitudes that still underpin France’s military presence in the region.

Denis is not afraid to present the boredom and pointlessness of the soldiers’ existence, which suggests that the paranoia and resentment of Galoup may be a twisted search for meaning and purpose in an environment otherwise defined by the rigidity of petty rules. The most obvious metaphor of the search for transcendence above the quotidian is dancing, notably in the contrast of the soldiers exercises and the local disco, which leads to the justly famous closing scene after Galoup has returned to France.

“What is really remarkable about Denis’s film is the way she succeeds in fusing the real and the dreamlike, the naturalistic and the figurative, into one visual conceit. Never for one moment does this shimmering, simmering emotional desert storm of a film relax its grip on your senses.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.