I can offer those intellectual justifications knowing that they are different from the emotional impulses that draw me to movies. And I can lay out everything that Denis and her co-screenwriter, Jean-Pol Fargeau, have jettisoned from Melville. And still it doesn't diminish the hold this movie has had on me since I saw it in the New York Film Festival last fall. The images, the heat-blasted rhythms and particularly Lavant's performance as Galoup worked their way into my head and have yet to leave. I can tote up the movie's deficiencies, describe all the work it makes you do just to make sense of its way of seeing and still not feel out of its grip.

Part of that work may have to do with getting past the movie fantasies that have formed the image most of us have of the French Foreign Legion. "Beau Travail" doesn't offer the romance epitomized by the stunningly beautiful young Gary Cooper in "Morocco." These are men who yield to the rigid discipline and unvarying routine of the Legion because there is nowhere else for them to go, because they are frightened of what they might wreak if they had to live in the world. Denis cuts between that routine and Galoup's life after he has been drummed out of the Legion. As a civilian in Marseille, he says he has "plenty of time to kill," and we watch Galoup as he tries to impose discipline on a life in which he feels no purpose. There's an instilled, mechanistic precision in the way he carefully stubs out a cigarette or takes in his wash or makes his bed. Even ironing his sharpest clothes for a night on the town has the trappings of ritual. But it's ritual divorced from the camaraderie that gave it meaning.

If "Beau Travail" were made from the viewpoint of the characters rather than from Denis' outsider's stance, the movie might be awash in the homoeroticism that pervades Melville's story. But it's Denis and Godard who are looking at the strapping young men stripped to the waist in the desert sun. Godard (whose past work includes several of Denis' films as well as Agnes Varda's "Jacquot" and Erick Zonca's "The Dreamlife of Angels" and who must be counted as one of the greatest cinematographers now working) focuses on the straining flesh of the men, the patterns of movement as they scramble under barbed wire during training or tend to their uniforms to maintain the Legion's standard of official elegance. In one scene, they stand under the beating sun with their arms raised to the sky, and we understand that we're watching a variation on the priesthood. The landscapes of Djibouti, encompassing both sand and sea, are both austere and ravishing (and rendered with startling clarity), a test of the ability of these military penitents to find discipline in a void.

Stranded back in civilization, the void is breathing down Galoup's neck. I couldn't stand Lavant in Leos Carax's "Bad Blood" and "The Lovers on the Bridge." As a romantic lead in those films he was a disaster. His simian mug shut out the camera, as did his "watch me, I'm falling apart" overacting. Now, nearly 10 years later, Levant has grown into his battered face. The pitted flesh and narrowed eyes and caved-in cheekbones have something of the roughness that attracts us to the male leads of Westerns and noirs. He looks like someone who has survived the beating life has handed out to him and so he takes on a certain authority that we respect.

Galoup is capable of tenderness, as when he gently places a bottle of perfume in the hand of his sleeping African girlfriend. But he's also untrustworthy. Melville described Claggart as possessing a "peculiar ferreting genius" and Galoup always looks capable of some deviousness, holding in his murderous impulses. "Beau Travail" has much more to do with the alluring and repellent Galoup than with Colin's Sentain (as in his other performances, Colin is the tabula rasa of contemporary French movies), and he's not the deepest character to put at the center of a movie. Next to Claggart he may not seem much of a character at all.

But Levant's presence holds a stony fascination, as much for what he appears on the verge of unleashing as for what he holds in. And when Levant does let loose in a final scene that comes out of the blue, summing up the movie and blasting it to pieces at the same time, he's astonishing. Starting out by embodying the discipline and bearing of the Legion, he proceeds to shred it to pieces before our eyes, blurring the line between freedom and bondage, between release and torment. It left me stunned, not believing what I'd just seen.

Denis' movies have left me both mystified and fascinated. Even after the ones I've loved, like "I Can't Sleep," I'm damned if I can say what they mean. "Beau Travail" is the most extreme example of her talent, baffling and exhilarating. I don't know when I've seen a movie that is in so many ways foreign to what draws me to movies and still felt under a spell. Let's just say that in "Beau Travail," and especially in Levant's performance, the director finds a way to perch the rigid fetishism of order right on the edge of chaos and, in the final moments, to dance suspended over the abyss. Denis leaves out huge swatches of narrative and motivation, but she has the rhythm of a life down cold.

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