For Lynda Nead, the female nude is usually a matter of containing sexuality; in the situation from the classical artwork record view represented by Kenneth Clark, this is about idealization and de-emphasis of overt sexuality, while the modern view recognizes that the human body is messy, unbounded,

The film is framed as the recollections of Sergeant Galoup, a former French legionnaire stationed in Djibouti (he’s played with a mixture of cruel reserve and vigorous physicality by the great Denis Lavant). Loosely determined by Herman Melville’s 1888 novella “Billy Budd,” t