Rhythm of the Night: Dance, Desire and Queer Masculinity in Beau Travail and Titane

This article focuses on the way queer sexuality and gender performance manifest in the dance sequences in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999) and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021). The boundary between sincerity and camp parody is not only obscured by the dance sequences featured in both films, but actively rejected, creating the impression of separate worlds-within-the-world that allow for an affective, fluid relationship of desire and domination to emerge between the dancing body and the watching body. Utilising Jack Halberstam’s characterisation of dancing as a manifestation of queer wildness, this article examines how scenes depicting dance establish a distinct poetics of melancholic camp masculinity. In their adherence to the objectification of the body as a spectacle of visual pleasure, these scenes queer the hyper-masculine spaces of the army barracks and the fire station, elucidating Judith Butler’s characterisation of gender as a continuous performance.