In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey argues Hollywood cinema provides "erotic pleasure" through a "skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure" (713). In many ways, gender gaze has focused on the male perspective of the female as sexually eroticized and idealized cinematic image, or "women as image, man as bearer of the look" in Mulvey's description (715). This sexual imbalance is sometimes reversed in contemporary cinema. In Claire Denis' film of the all-male world of the French Foreign Legion, Beau Travail, the director's female gaze objectifies underwear-clad attractive males going through training and drills that seem transformed into an erotic dance. These rites of ecstasy in this authoritarian, all-male world show a masculine image from the awing gaze of the director. The excesses of maleness apparent in the character of Sergeant Galoup seems to be Denis' way of arguing that in such a male oriented and aggressive environment such behavior is to be expected.
In Beau Travail we have the director's feminine gaze trained on the male members of the Legionnaire outpost, but so is the male gaze of Commander Bruno Forestier on his men. This is especially true toward the increasingly jealous and vengeful Sergeant Galoup as he persecutes a new recruit, Gilles Sentain. Forestier notes at one point, "If it weren't for fornication and blood, we wouldn't be here" (Denis 1999). However, Forestier's gaze and the erotic nature of the men's daily routine and rituals is not as homoerotic as it is about the impact on men of being in close contact in a rigid and authoritarian unit without any women. Galoup will basically condemn Sentain to a harsh death. He narrates the film after the Court Martial that gets him dismissed from the French Foreign Legion. As he tells us, "From a certain point of view, I screwed up, and points of view are important" (Denis 19
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