So this is a movie from 1998, which puts it way into the hyper-modern portion of this list, but given that, what’s weird is that it’s not available to stream literally anywhere, and even the DVD you can buy from Amazon is a third-party only thing that oh btw is Region 2 so won’t even play in US DVD players (although I think by the end, many of them ignored region coding). So it’d be basically impossible to watch if not for the magic of non-copyright-observing archivists and public domain subtitles (it’s French), despite its recency. So I guess I’ll warn you that I’m going to spoil this, but really you’d have to work to see it anyway.

So, the movie is apparently based loosely on “Billy Budd,” except that instead of being on a whaling ship (I assume), it’s the French foreign legion in Djibouti. I’ve obviously never read that Melville story, so I won’t speak of it again, except to note that the movie also uses as its soundtrack excerpts from Britten’s “Billy Budd” opera (which, it turns out, is very modern in that atonal way).

That music is typically set against scenes of soldiers exercising or drilling (as in the little preview picture below) in ways that feel nearly balletic. And really, that’s what a lot of the movie is, these slow languorous scenes of the soldiers going through these repetitive dance-like drills with little speaking. It’s not really like Kubrick at all — it’s much too warm and human for that — but it’s not completely ridiculous to think about the ways that he turned space maneuvers into dance in 2001. (Keeping the dance theme going, there are also scenes set in a dance hall in Djibouti, where local women dance to Afro-pop.)

But the story, such as it is, is that the sergeant takes a dislike to a new recruit (for no reason the movie ever mentions, though critics seem to unanimously believe it’s a sort of gay-hating backlash from being attracted to him; there’s tbh not a whole lot to support that, but also nothing to undercut it), and tensions mount (expressed not in dialogue, but in gaze and stance and one memorable scene where they are circling each other like lions), and finally the sergeant sabotages the recruit’s compass and sends him off into the wilderness, where he nearly dies. The sergeant’s perfidy is found out, and he’s expelled from the Legion and sent back to France for a court martial, which it turns out is the framing story and where some retrospective narration comes from.

And then at the end, the sergeant sees a group of legionnaires, clearly misses that camaraderie, goes home, makes his bed up with military precision, lies down on it, gets out his gun, and…

… WE CUT TO A FLASHBACK AT AN OTHERWISE-EMPTY DJIBOUTI DANCE HALL WHERE “RHYTHM OF THE NIGHT” IS PLAYING, AND HE PROCEEDS TO DANCE HIS HEART OUT.

I’m not even kidding. I had to laugh because, what the hell, the jump from the implied grim “military dude kills himself” ending to this out-of-nowhere hyperkinetic Night at the Roxbury goes beyond the absurd to the delightful.

This is a slight movie in a lot of ways — it’s only 90 minutes, there’s not a lot of dialogue, not much of a story — but it’s got so much texture packed into it, it’s like the movie equivalent of a poem. A pleasant surprise for me.