One of the remarkable feats of Claire Denis’ recent film Beau Travail is to turn ironing into an erotic spectacle. That most humble of ‘travails’ becomes an important part of the ceaseless, sizzling ballet that the director makes of the daily round of a group of present-day French Legionnaires stationed in Djibouti. The feat is not remarked on in Robert Aldrich’s near-to-encyclopedic Colonialism and Homosexuality, though the film is duly listed in his epilogue, ‘After the Empire’. It certainly qualifies as one of the most vivid recent reminders of that long tradition he traces of representing ‘the whole of the North African world … as a sensuous experience’ – and a sensual one.