‘Disco Boy’ movie review: an enthralling character study
If Disco Boy is any indication, then writer and director Giacomo Abbruzzese has an incredibly bright future ahead of him as a feature-length filmmaker. His debut weaves through countless styles, tones, and techniques to create a startling and ambitious exploration of the many facets of independence.
Franz Rogowski’s Aleksei is a Belorussian who sets out to secure his own interpretation of the term. He crosses the border from his home country into Poland by bus, wades through cold rivers, and flees from the authorities on his way to Paris, where he signs up with the French Foreign Legion based on its promise of residence and citizenship should he pass the requisite training.
Meanwhile, in the Niger Delta region, Morr Ndiaye’s Jomo has dreams of being a nightclub dancer. He’s the ‘disco boy’ of the title. Still, he’s also the leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta organisation, who kidnap a group of French nationals to prevent unscrupulous oil corporations from moving in. A squad of legionnaires are dispatched to resolve the conflict, bringing the two protagonists face to face.
The simple and perhaps conventionally obvious route would have been for Abbruzzese to flit between Aleksei and Jomo’s stories. Instead, Disco Boy operates in a more segmented fashion and is more powerful as a result. Coming in at a lean 90 minutes, the running time allows the first act to focus on the former, the second to shift attention to the latter, with the final act reflecting on all that’s come before and intertwining them along the way.
It’s a bold, dizzying, and daring technique that’s borderline audacious in both its simplicity on paper and ingenuity in practice. The filmmaker has set out a stall as someone willing to take risks in the service of not only the story they’re telling but the thematic undercurrent that carries it along, as well as the way they choose to present it to an audience.
There’s a grounded and tangible realism to everything that unfolds narratively. However, Abbruzzese has no issues flirting with psychedelic sequences and almost supernatural segues. These segments take its two central characters and place them at opposite ends of an inciting incident, only to gradually peel back the layers and reveal them to be something agonisingly close to kindred spirits.
Aleksei undertook the perilous journey for France because he wanted an identity of his own, while Jomo defends his people in the face of an external threat while simultaneously longing for something else entirely that the Niger Delta may not be able to give him. Disco Boy is rich in its meditations on what home means, how it feels to belong, as well as the trauma that can regularly inform both. The dreamlike visuals, a soundtrack from Vitalic that’s both thumping and jarring from scene to scene, and gorgeous cinematography add layers to a very real, resonant, and hard-hitting story in otherworldly textures.
If there are any negatives – and there are very few, in fairness – it’s that Disco Boy always feels like it’s teetering on the brink of genuine profundity without tipping over. Individually, each element is strong, and the recurring thread of individuals with no state to call their own serving it in the name of achieving that very goal is a resonant one. Unfortunately, it’s lacking a certain cohesion to bring it all home and tie everything together to maximum effect.
That being said, it’s a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. As it stands, Disco Boy is an enthralling character study and occasional head trip that promises even bigger and better things to come from Abbruzzese.
