This feature debut from the Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese takes on ordinary people trying to free themselves from the bonds of their homelands.
A dance, in the forest, first eerily hypnotic and then propulsive, collides with a tableau of ravaged lands and oil-slicked waters. It’s an abrupt cut between scenes that embodies in miniature the central tension of “Disco Boy” — a neon-dream parable cast against the shadow of sweeping global forces.
It’s also when the disparate stories of this entrancing feature debut from the Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese finally converge. Alex (Franz Rogowski) is an undocumented Belarusian immigrant who, after crossing into France, joins the Foreign Legion for a chance at getting his papers and starting a new life. At the same time, in the Niger Delta, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) is leading a rebel group fighting the devastating foreign exploitation of the area’s oil-rich land. When Jomo’s group takes a foreigner hostage, Alex leads a rescue mission that brings him right into Jomo’s path.
They are on opposite sides of an unremarkable clash, in Abbruzzese’s eyes just a violent blur of bodies forming another speck in the grand scheme of armed conflict. And yet, the film laments, their stories are the same: They are ordinary people, unwittingly caught up in the cold gusts of empire — men who, hoping for better lives, are pushed toward cruel fates beyond their control.
Even if it sometimes borrows too overtly from its obvious influence, “Beau Travail,” the 1999 opus by Claire Denis, “Disco Boy” is a lean but sweepingly ambitious film crafted with formal rigor. Abbruzzese deftly transitions between haunting silence and kinetic energy, a balance supported in particular by Vitalic’s pulsating score and the inspired compositions of the cinematographer Hélène Louvart. Rogowski pulls it all together with stoic features that emanate so much sorrow and history.
“Do you ever wonder what you’d have become, if you’d been born on the other side, among the whites?” Jomo asks his comrade at one point in the film. The tragedy is that they’ll never know.
Disco Boy
Not rated. In Igbo, French, Russian, Nigerian English and Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
