Dorney, Steve

Dorney, Steve

Steve Dorney

1 June 2001Review

Artificial Eye Film Co, France 1998, UK video release 2000. Running time 90 mins [French with English subtitles].

A dreamlike account of dysfunctional life in the modern French Foreign Legion. Stuck in Marseilles after being cast out from his beloved military “family”, Staff Sergeant Galoup recalls his time in Djibouti as a sun-baked idyll.

From Galoup's remembered perspective the East African landscape seems to be populated with happy, compliant locals and the eroticised bodies of legionnaires. But as Galoup himself says, “viewpoints count”, and this nostalgia-laden view of the post-colonial…