Disco Boy Review: Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Vibrant Depiction of a Struggle for Identity

Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy is a daring film about the myths and errancies that Europe make (im)possible, dipping in and out of traditional modes of storytelling and dreamy flights of fancy. At times, it seems more devoted to its poetic interludes, from uncanny dance sequences to ghostly encounters, than to moving its plot along, and excitingly so.

Early in the film, Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) and his friend Mikhail (Michal Balicki) slip away from a group of fellow Belarusians on a trip to Poland, after which it’s revealed that the pair seeks to reach France and rebuild their lives. Mikhail will have died by the time that Aleksei, now more broken than he was before, reaches Paris. An opportunity to be a soldier for the French Foreign Legion arises and he seizes it, along with the promise of becoming a French citizen in the distant future. But not before engaging in warfare in the Niger Delta, where he’s forced to kill in the name of France, or Europe, or some other, face-less neocolonial power.

Lack of clarity, it turns out, is what makes Disco Boy so enjoyable, and imbues it with gravitas. Not because Abbruzzese aims to confuse us, but because he wants the film to mirror the rhythms of the human mind as a person goes through life, enduring its mysteries. Though there are daytime sequences in Disco Boy, its atmosphere is suggestive of a never-ending night, as if the story could only move forward inasmuch as it traverses the circularity of trauma.

Having killed traumatizes Aleksei, and Rogowski’s face proves to be the perfect vehicle for conveying indescribable wounds. It’s ambiguous, unpredictable, even treacherous in the subtlest of ways, alive to all that’s kicking beneath the surface of his character’s being.

Of course, Rogowski’s is not the face of Rudolph Valentino or Greta Garbo, capable of
causing riots and suicides or the kind of feverish commotion that Roland Barthes describes in his renowned essay “Leaving the Movie Theatre.” His is a rawer face, somewhere between the ordinary and the uncanny, the banal and the tragic. Here it isn’t the eyes that are “two faintly tremulous wounds,” as Barthes said of Garbo’s. Rather, his entire face suggests a faintly tremulous wound, emanating the trace of history—of violence—from his scarred lip outward.

Abbruzzese allows Rogowski’s presence to fill up the frame, emptying out the screen of distracting elements that would, in almost any other film, craft the atmosphere of an all-functioning world. Rogowski is allowed to move through the space of Disco Boy in much the same way that Alain Delon’s Corey wandered around Paris in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge, where a beige trench coat cemented Delon as a generational icon of cool, beauty, and the sublime. In Disco Boy, our hero also wears a jacket, only here its fabric is black, suggestive of Abbruzzese’s refusal to render Aleksei and his intentions transparent.

There’s no real stillness in the cinema of the kind that Abbruzzese accomplishes with Disco Boy, which deploys its magical-realist flourishes, in the Nigerian woods and on a Parisian dance floor alike, with striking confidence. These scenes are rife with pathos, even if, at times, they’re also a little bit messy—particularly a few problematic sequences, accompanied by Vitalic’s aggressive electronic score, that depict shamanic dances around bonfires in the village that a revolutionary named Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), and his sister, Udoka (Laëtitia Ky), call home.

In the spectral world of the film, each scenic element gains symbolic status, evoking the profundity of surfaces in dreamscapes. Aleksei’s jacket is made of leather—hard, matte, and pointedly creaking like machinery as he walks through a nightclub. There, he orders two glasses of Bordeaux, silently toasting the dead Mikhail, before encountering a woman (also played by Ky) who suggests a projection of Udoka, who he never met in the Niger Delta. Wearing a sequined dress on the dance floor, she casts a spell on him so well cast that he doesn’t stand a chance—a spell that recalls Freud’s famous remarks about the “shine on the nose.”

It’s the sort of je ne sais quoi detail that sucks one into irrational attraction, despite everything else stacked against potential lovers. The figurative shine on Aleksei’s nose is akin to the shine of the dress, which is made up of chains of silvery disk-shaped ornaments—mirrors, really, for him and the audience to peer into. It’s a great departure from the opacity of Rogowski’s leather vest, which reflects nothing apart from the hardened injuries of a worn-out body.

Although not as hardened as that, as the astounding final sequence (think Gene Kelly on an acid trip), which helps give Disco Boy its title, testifies. The woman with the glistening costume reappears in front of Aleksei on the dance floor after he goes looking for her in a hotel room. Is she a ghost, a reverie, a figment of his imagination? Either way, she renders Aleksei’s body supple, as if fleetingly cured from the malaise of life, freed from the toll that the reality takes on those who aren’t allowed to dream—and who do it anyway.