Man in a Desert

Man in a Desert

by Derek Neal What if you took Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” concept and transposed it to the vast expanse of the African desert? You would get something like Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), which shows that the room a man locks himself in doesn’t need to be literal—a prison can be made anywhere. In Denis’ film, the man in a room is Galoup, a French Foreign Legion sergeant who commands a group of some 15 men in Djibouti. He is, he tells us …