French actor Denis Lavant has a slightly simian appearance. His face, dominated by a heavy forehead, deep-set eyes and a broad, blunt nose, can move quickly from melancholy to feral. His large head sits atop a small, wiry frame. In short, he’s an unlikely leading actor, let alone a dancer; he doesn’t have the classic, or classical, physiognomy of someone who works in a medium that frequently expects physical perfection to equal or exceed that of physical prowess and artistic interpretation.

Lavant’s dancing isn’t pretty or beautiful either; it’s contorted, often frenzied, occasionally borderline grotesque, which makes it all the more mesmerizing, and never more so than during the closing credits of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail.