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    ‘Disco Boy’ Review: Pawns in a Bigger Game Struggle for a New Start

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    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 BoyNot rated. In Igbo, French, Russian, Nigerian English and Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Passages’ Review: A Toxic Triangle

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      In Ira Sachs’ latest wince-inducing romance, Tomas (Franz Rogowski) has wedged himself into a love triangle with Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos.“Passages” takes its name from a film-within-a-film that we get one glimpse of at the start of Ira Sachs’ latest wince-inducing romance. It doesn’t look very good — an airless, stylized period piece, the kind of movie Sachs would never make himself. Worse, its fictional director, Tomas (Franz Rogowski), is so fixated on imperceptible details, and so unable to articulate his desires, that he eventually explodes on set. “It’s not that you have to come down the staircase, you want to come down the staircase!” he rages, aggrieved that no one is able to read his mind.Tomas is whiny, needy, petulant and selfish. (TikTok users could slap him with a dozen diagnoses or just settle on “toxic.”) He’d make a great reality show contestant, but here he’s wedged himself into a love triangle with his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), and his girlfriend, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Viewers naïve enough to expect that an Ira Sachs movie might resolve happily will be disappointed.Sachs has formed his own unconventional family. He and his husband, Boris Torres (an artist, as Martin sort-of is), share twins with the filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. “Passages” feels like Sachs and his longtime writing partner, Mauricio Zacharias, are questioning what his life would be if he’d gone about it all wrong: if he hadn’t been sensitive to others’ emotions, if he’d been slippery and noncommittal, if he’d made phonier films. Perhaps Tomas, performed by Rogowski with swivel-hipped, sulky charisma, is Sachs’ shadow self. But he’s like a lot of other people’s bad exes, too, which means that the bleakest moments often trigger a snort-laugh of schadenfreude at the fix his characters find themselves in.The misery unfurls in a straight timeline of dramatic scenes that leap over the lived-in moments that make up a relationship. We only get fleeting seconds of Martin and Agathe without Tomas dominating the conversation, or lack of one, as he tends to mutely prod them into an extended sex scene. (The film initially received an NC-17 rating, but is now unrated.) As a result, we barely know his partners at all. Agathe, in particular, might look powerful in Khadija Zeggaï’s striking costumes, but she’s so vaguely written that she barely seems to exist when Tomas isn’t in the room. She reminded me of a moment in Caity Weaver’s 2016 GQ profile of Justin Bieber where she and the music superstar walk in on his future wife, Hailey, “doing nothing — no TV, no book, no phone, no computer, no music, no oil paints, nothing.”Some of this indifference is deliberate. Sachs frames one talk between the spouses with Tomas’s body eclipsing Martin’s until he’s invisible; the camera reflects how little Tomas sees his partners, too. But capturing these truths leaves a void in the film. Exhausted (as we also become) by their fruitless, repetitive attempts to set boundaries, the wounded lovers reclaim their independence by receding so deeply into themselves that even Tomas can’t reach them anymore — and by that time, we’ve already given up.PassagesNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In ‘Passages,’ ‘Sex Is a Huge Part of a Character’s Life’

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      The three stars of Ira Sachs’ new movie — Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos — discuss the graphic film’s approach to sexuality and intimacy.When Ira Sachs’ new movie “Passages” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, critics couldn’t stop talking about the sex scenes. The movie, a drama set in Paris about a film director who leaves his longtime boyfriend for a young woman, featured an all-star European art-house cast — Franz Rogowski (“Transit,” “Great Freedom”), Ben Whishaw (“The Lobster,” “Little Joe”) and Adèle Exarchopoulos (“Blue is the Warmest Color”) — negotiating infidelity and betrayal. And having graphic sex.Those scenes led the M.P.A. to give the film a surprise NC-17 rating. The filmmakers opted to release the film in the United States without such a classification, a move that may limit the number of theaters willing to show the film when it comes out on Aug. 4.There has been fierce debate in recent years about the role of sex scenes in movies. Following the MeToo movement’s reckoning with gender inequality and sexual misbehavior, some have asked whether it is still possible to film such intimate acts without putting performers into precarious situations. More recently, some Gen-Z social media users have argued that sex scenes are unnecessary and should be excised from cinema more broadly.In two joint video interviews, between Whishaw and Rogowski, and Rogowski and Exarchopoulos, the actors discussed their experiences making the movie and its approach to sexuality and intimacy. (The interview with Whishaw, who is a member of SAG-AFTRA, was conducted before the actors’ strike began.)Exarchopoulos noted that her career had been shaped early on by the depiction of sex onscreen. One of her first films, “Blue is the Warmest Color,” a portrait of a lesbian relationship that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, faced pushback from some critics who argued that the film’s graphic sex scenes objectified its stars. Exarchopoulos and her co-star, Léa Seydoux, later said that the director’s treatment of them during the shoot had made them feel uncomfortable and disrespected.Nevertheless, Exarchopoulos said she believed that sex scenes — and those of “Passages” in particular — were often crucial to movies for depicting relationships. “Sex is a huge part of a character’s life,” she said. “Blue is the Warmest Color” had taught her “how having sex, or not having sex, and your relationship with your body, is a conversation and says a lot about who you are and who you are trying to be,” she said.Her character in “Passages” — a schoolteacher named Agathe who embarks on an affair with Tomas (Rogowski), after meeting him at a wrap party for his film — wants to “test her limits,” she said. As an actress, the biggest challenge was finding new ways of depicting intimacy onscreen, given her early performance in “Blue is the Warmest Color” and its emphasis on sex: “I don’t want to bore people, showing myself the same way,” she said.Ben Whishaw, left, plays Martin, a graphic designer who Rogowski’s character abandons.SBS ProductionsRogowski is also no stranger to revealing roles: He said he had felt pressured into appearing naked in previous film and theater projects to add what he described as an “edgy” element to a production. He felt ambivalent about those experiences, he said. “The problem wasn’t the sex scene; it was that these movies were pretentious and flat, and you can’t turn it into something real just by taking off your underwear.”Perhaps the most talked about sex scene in “Passages” occurs when Martin, Whishaw’s character, and Tomas end up in bed together after a series of betrayals. Rogowski said that the sequence was notable beyond its graphic nature, for its emotional depiction of two long-term partners negotiating power and pain through sex.“It’s a couple having sex, it’s someone in a position of a victim taking over,” Rogowski said. “I think if someone only sees the film’s sex scenes as just explicit scenes of intercourse, then they should just watch another movie.”In recent years, Whishaw said, the more widespread use of intimacy coordinators — experts who help performers negotiate their potential discomfort during sex scenes — has created a healthier atmosphere for actors, including himself. Before “this development, the actors were sort of left to do it for themselves, because the director was embarrassed, or didn’t know how to talk about it.”For “Passages,” he added, the cast opted not to use such a coach. “I think it’s OK if the group of people filming a scene are cool with doing it among themselves,” he said. “It’s about respect and trust and sharing creative goals.”The film is also notable for the unremarkable way it treats Tomas’s apparent bisexuality as he negotiates relationships with Agathe and Martin. That approach, Exarchopoulos said, played a large part in attracting her to the part. “It’s very normal in my own life and circles,” she said, for people to have relationships with either sex. Rogowski added that such love affairs were also commonplace in Berlin, where he lives. “I know it’s a cliché about Berlin, but some clichés are true,” he said.Rogowski’s character, a tyrannical film director prone to on-set outbursts who frequently manipulates others to suit his own needs, reminded Exarchopoulos of colleagues she had encountered on movie sets, she said. “During the shoot, people in the production can sometimes be childish and have an ego, because they have power,” she said. “I have a lot of empathy for them.”Tomas’s headstrong nature is reflected in his character’s gender-forward fashion choices.MUBIAt first, Rogowski said, he struggled to identify with Tomas. “When I read the script, I thought, ‘This is a tough one, how am I going to justify his behavior?’” he said, adding that he eventually found the character’s lack of conventional morality to be liberating.“A moral code is a kind of costume, and it’s interesting to change this costume,” Rogowski said. “For me personally, morality is a shady friend. It is related to religion and power structures, and it is, in many ways, a way of avoiding having your own opinion and exploring life.”Rogowski said he believed that the notion of labeling film directors or actors as egocentric, or narcissists, is often a way of dismissing the value of their work. “Most of us have lost our relationships with ourselves, and don’t have enough time to be inspired by ourselves,” he said. “Most of us should be a bit more narcissistic.”He added that Tomas’s headstrong nature is reflected in his character’s gender-forward fashion choices, which include some of the more memorable looks in recent art house cinema. Rogowski said was pleasantly surprised by his high-fashion outfits — which include a see-through sweater, a snakeskin jacket and a sheer crop-top — chosen by the film’s costume designer, Khadija Zeggaï. “I still have some of those items in my wardrobe,” he said.The crop-top makes a particularly memorable appearance in a tense scene midway through the film, when Agathe invites her button-down, middle-class parents to meet her new boyfriend — a meal that grows increasingly disastrous by each passing minute. “It’s a nightmare,” Rogowski said. “I would have put on the most heteronormative T-shirt I could have found, just to make sure they are happy.”Whishaw chimed in: “But what a wonderful thing that he does that.” Even though “there is a lot of pain in the film, there is joy underneath,” he said. “Everything is mixed up in this intricate way, and I think that’s what gives the film its soul.” More

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      ‘Luzifer’ Review: Finding the Devil in Everything

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      A son must save his ailing mother in this disturbing, ambitious religious thriller.In Peter Brunner’s “Luzifer,” a mother and her adult son, Maria and Johannes, live isolated from society in a remote alpine cabin. Maria (Susanne Jensen) is a recovering alcoholic who turned to religion to escape her vices, and imparts the lessons of a pious existence onto Johannes (Franz Rogowski), who functions on the developmental level of a child. The two spend their days subsistence farming, or engaged in deep prayer and sacred rituals.When a developer arrives in the area to build a ski lift for tourists, the pastoral life of this family is threatened. Maria receives angry calls about selling her land, but when she refuses, the developers’ tactics become violently aggressive. She falls ill, ostensibly from the emotional turmoil, and Johannes must save her.
      “Luzifer” conjures palpable unease, rattling the nervous system. The cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg renders this world with an icy aura. The entire film feels enveloped in a cold fog, and at times, haunting images, like a mutilated corpse in a nearby lake, flash by. Tim Hecker’s spectral score pierces the drama throughout, immersing us in a disturbing, transfixing universe.This thriller is ambitious, contemplating the sinister and possessive grip of religious fanaticism; the dangers of capitalist greed; the reverberations of Oedipal desire; familial trauma and abuse, among other themes. But its intellectual aspiration produces an ideologically crowded film, where each philosophical meditation struggles to receive the attention and depth it deserves. Perhaps that is the point: Brunner seems to want to leave us with more questions than answers — or at least, compel us to search for the devil in everything.LuziferNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Great Freedom’ Review: Unbroken

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      In this moving period drama, a German gay man repeatedly declares his independence in a country that criminalizes his desire and his identity.The first time you see the exhilaratingly stubborn hero of “Great Freedom,” he is moving around a grubby public bathroom. Fit and jaggedly handsome, with short hair and sideburns, he looks coiled with impatience, restless yet confident. A trim mustache frames his sensual mouth, and his biceps are set off by his short sleeves. He paces, occasionally drawing on a cigarette, and at one point stands in the open doorway looking out, as if waiting for someone.Other men soon enter the bathroom and with shared, feverish purpose and practiced gestures, they and Hans (the indispensable Franz Rogowski) have sex, a basic human act, if one that challenges the state. It’s 1968 and the West German law known as Paragraph 175 prohibits sex between men, with offenders subject to imprisonment. Incorporated into the German criminal code in the 1870s, the law was expanded and viciously enforced by the Nazis; shockingly, a version remained on the West German books for decades after the war.Low key, affecting and insistently unsentimental, “Great Freedom” is a fictional story of resistance against this inhumane law, a story of salvation told one caress and sexual encounter at a time. For Hans, the bathroom is a refuge, a necessity, a pleasure zone and merely one of the many restricted, otherwise unloved spaces — almost all in prison — that he occupies and, in his way, liberates. Shortly after the movie opens, he is sentenced to two years without probation, a penalty that he doesn’t bother to challenge in court. Hans has his own way of protesting: He loves and has sex with who he wants, when he wants, how he wants.And he does so again and again as the years and prison terms slip into one another. He falls in love, has different partners and lives his life. There are beautiful, ugly and nondescript men, alternately caring and cruel lovers. Hans opens himself to these different souls even as he keeps to himself, generally revealing little to others. He’s beaten and abused, and keeps on going. He paces and smokes in the yard, and is repeatedly thrown into solitary to languish in a hellish, unlit pit. As the punishments and years mount and his hair turns gray, you wonder how he can stand it. Until, that is, you remember that outside is a type of prison, too.The director Sebastian Meise, who wrote the script with Thomas Reider, tells this story with open feeling and steady, emphatic calm. Emotions run predictably hot in the prison — there are beatings and a horrible death — but Meise doesn’t amp the violence or use it as a crutch. Instead, he uses the prison’s claustrophobia, its confining rooms and darkness, and Rogowski’s immaculately controlled performance to create an aura of intimate reserve that draws you to Hans, though at a slight remove. You grow fond of Hans, but you also remain an outsider, watching as he weathers prison, faces existential threats and finds furtive joys.These hard-won pleasures are sprinkled across the story’s two well-paced episodic hours, which jump around in time and span several decades. Kinked timelines have become a wretched cliché, but here the jumbled chronology expresses the associative flow of memory, how one face evokes another and one touch summons up a lost world. In one flashback, Hans appears as a wincingly thin captive who, after serving time in a Nazi concentration camp, has now been imprisoned by the Allies. In another flashback it’s 1957 and Hans is now buoyed by his relationship with Oskar (Thomas Prenn), who’s nowhere as resilient.There are other men and other entanglements, including with a sweet-faced young schoolteacher (Anton von Lucke), whom Hans meets in that bathroom in 1968 and later poignantly serves time with. Hans’s most consistent if unlikely relationship, though, is with Viktor (a fantastic Georg Friedrich), a rough, brutishly charismatic slab of a man serving a life sentence for murder. Covered with jailhouse tattoos and plagued by a series of sad, greasy haircuts, Victor is at once repulsed and transparently captivated by Hans. For his part, Hans carefully navigates the other man with his well-honed faculty for self-preservation.“Great Freedom” is an unexpectedly tender movie. This gentleness is a welcome relief — narratively, emotionally — from the canned barbarism of many prison movies, with their exploitative jolts, their shanks, cruelties and grim, casual sexual violence. It’s also fundamentally political. The inmates brutalize one another, but there’s love here, too; the most horrific violence originates from the prison itself and, by extension, the state that dehumanizes these men (or tries to), criminalizing both their desires and their very personhood.Meise and Reider don’t burden the characters with chest-thumping or expository speeches; there are no title cards crammed with encyclopedic histories or triumphant flag waving. One of the few nods in the movie toward the future (though this may be a matter of translation) is tucked into a prisoner’s plaintive question: “Why do you always act up, Hans?” He does, unreservedly, but part of his appeal is that he doesn’t always say what he thinks, which intensifies your interest. Other people are invariably a mystery, but one thing you do know: Even as the world closes around him, legally and physically, Hans remains free.Great FreedomNot rated. In German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Undine’ Review: Love In and Out of the Water

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      Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, who made an impression in 2019’s “Transit,” are reunited by the director Christian Petzold for this adaptation of a European myth.At an outdoor table of a small cafe situated on the ground floor of an imposing brick building, two lovers are ending their affair. The woman of the pair, not happy with this development, bickers with the man about a voice mail message. When that thread is exhausted, she tells him matter-of-factly, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.”Well, that escalated quickly. The woman, whose name is Undine — played with equal parts passion and calculation by Paula Beer — retains our sympathy even as she makes that unreasonable pronouncement. Because, as it happens, it’s not unreasonable. Undine is not mentally ill or morally reckless. What she’s talking about here is fate. With seemingly minimal means, the writer-director Christian Petzold makes the viewer understand this, mere minutes into the story, adapted from a European myth about a water sprite who can fall in love and become human, but who must suffer greatly if her lover is unfaithful.This modern-day Undine is, on land, a historian who instructs wealthy tourists on Berlin’s aesthetic and political schisms over the centuries. These sessions lead to sometimes tense exchanges: an evocation of “an architecture in keeping with national tradition,” for example, prompts the question, “Hadn’t the Nazis discredited nationalism?”But Petzold doesn’t hammer the potential for political parable or allegory here — which is a little surprising, given the lessons on modern German history he offers up in pictures such as “Phoenix.” Instead, this fractured not-quite-fairy-tale parcels out provocative instances of magical realism on arguably larger themes.After being ditched by her sniveling partner Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), Undine almost immediately retreats into the cafe, where she fixates on a small statue of a helmeted sea diver in a fish tank. The aquarium vibrates and soon explodes, knocking her to the floor with another man, Christoph (Franz Rogowski). They’re both drenched, and she’s a bit cut up by shards from the tank.This peculiar meet-cute is handled straightforwardly (the movie’s clean, economical production design, by Merlin Ortner, grounds the picture in this respect), as are the story’s other fantastic elements — including an ethereal catfish and a diving outing during which Undine mysteriously sheds her wet suit, flippers and oxygen tank.Undine’s new love — the kind, compassionate and knowing Christoph (he and Beer were also paired in Petzold’s prior film, “Transit”) — is himself a diver. Being near him makes Undine feel more at home, so to speak. But Christoph’s work, welding underwater turbines, is risky. Soon Undine is presented with a dilemma that forces her to confront a fate she had hoped her new happiness would help her avoid.Petzold’s cinematic storytelling style is elegant but unfussy, perfectly complemented by Hans Fromm’s cinematography and by the sparely used music, which includes the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson’s dreamy interpretations of Bach and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” “Undine” is ultimately more enigmatic than most of Petzold’s work. It is also, like its title character, eerily beautiful. While it could well serve as a high-end date movie, it’s also something more.UndineNot rated. In German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More