Director: Giacomo Abbruzzese
Stars: Franz Rogowski, Morr Ndiaye, Laëtitia Ky
Directed by Italian Giacomo Abbruzzese – who has a smattering of short features to his name – this tale of nomadic Belarusian Alexei (the great Franz Rogowski) who joins the Foreign Legion after fatefully smuggling himself into France smacks of Claire Denis. Faux Travail, if you’ll excuse me. But there’s more connecting Disco Boy to Denis’ justly celebrated masterpiece than just the scrutiny of life as a Legionnaire. Abbruzzese lifts a certain sensibility from Denis, too. An oppressive undulating, menacing vibe, one that requests the participation of an audience, and which frequently dismisses exposition as something for lesser filmmakers.
If Abbruzzese’s technique is designed specifically to ape Denis’ then he presents an admirable facsimile. Rogowski’s Alexei is a diffident, inscrutable fellow. A man without a past. Other than a taste for terrible dance music, we know little beyond the few cursory words of dissatisfaction that a fellow countryman ekes out of him at a night club bar toward the end of the picture. He’s a ghost, a no-one. Or, as his CO in the Legion is happy to remind him, an ‘illegal’; a person outside of the system.
Alexei joins up after his friend Mikhail (Michał Balicki) is accidentally killed crossing into France, making his decision feel like an act of mourning and prelude to a greater crisis to come. Excelling through basic training, we jump to Alexei’s deployment in Nigeria, where Disco Boy briefly shifts focus to fugitive and resistance leader Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), head of a terrorist splinter cell MEND (Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta) who shares a striking discoloured eye with his sister Udoka (Laëtitia Ky). Jomo is the target of Alexei’s mission, and the middle act of Disco Boy manifests a tense descent into Heart of Darkness territory, one which centres around a vivid, video-game-like combat sequence that takes place in ominous infrared. Besting his foe, Alexei returns to Paris profoundly changed. Perhaps, even, possessed…
There’s a lot at play in Disco Boy. Perhaps too much, as some of the disparate thematic threads have a habit of tapering off into nothing. For a time it seems as though the pivot point of the film is going to be Alexei’s proto-homoerotic competitiveness with fellow recruit Francesco (Matteo Olivetti), but this fails to amount to anything (perhaps out of recognition that it would play too far into the shadow of Beau Travail). Similarly, Abbruzzese tilts toward the geopolitical via Jomo’s valid criticisms of the exploitation of Nigeria for its oil prospects… a line of enquiry that also seems to dead-end once we return with Alexei to Paris.
But while the apparent focus is as flighty as Abbruzzese’s protagonist, there’s an undeniable spell cast in the way he uses sound and vision to keep us moving forward with Alexei, even as the nominal notions of the character begin to disperse. Survivor’s guilt. Colonialist guilt. The dehumanisation of the military. The anonymity of a drifter with no cultural identity. All of these things comingle in a woozy third act that hinges on a deeply improbable contrivance.
Against all odds, Alexei visits a Paris night club only to become bewitched by Udoka, who has somehow also arrived there as a dancer. Taken on face value it might feel like stretched credulity, but it occurs in a protracted sequence of dreamy experiences, leading to the suggestion that she may not really be there at all, as we are prodded to question Alexei’s mental state following his combat duty. The man without a past becomes obsessed with the woman that wasn’t there. Her echoing presence in the third act itches with white Europe’s view of Africa as a source of magic and exoticism. An exploitation of another kind. There’s a tension there that mirrors Alexei’s own fixation.
While there’s underdeveloped noise surrounding Alexei, he – and Rogowski – are the northern most point on Abbruzzese’s compass, and commanding enough to lead us wherever this snaking tale slinks. Hélène Louvart, the cinematographer who has so bewitched the films of Eliza Hittman and Alice Rohwacher, proffers some real incendiary work here, matched in the editing room by Abbruzzese and his cohorts Fabrizio Federico and Ariane Boukerche. Between them they keep Disco Boy limber, nimble. Sinuous like the muscles in the young men doing performative chin-ups in the cold.
The central conceit of Disco Boy is losing oneself to one’s enemy, but what if said enemy is someone of no consequence to you? Just a name? Just an order? Who do you become after? Who are you for having followed the order? It’s perhaps not revelatory ground, but Abbruzzese makes it feel urgent nevertheless, and with such beguiling images, he steps far enough from the shadow of Denis to announce himself as an interesting new player. In the end, the scrappy faults around the margins are part and parcel of his hypnotic mixture.
The Lost Highway Hotel 