There’s a hollow thump at the heart of Giacomo Abbruzzese’s confident and stylish but ultimately shallow debut Disco Boy. A tale of colonialism, imperialism, and the way western cultural hegemony infects every other nation, from Eastern Europe to the jungles of Africa, it’s admirably full of ideas, but never quite finds an effective or original enough way to express them. Bolstered by a strong, if a little underserved, central performance from the ever reliable Franz Rogowski, Disco Boy marks the arrival of an interesting future talent in Abbruzzese, but falls flat on its own merits.
Rogowski plays Aleksei, a Belarusian man who uses the excuse of an away game for the Belarus national football team against Poland to get into the EU and, from there, flee to France (his exact motives are never revealed, but hints at his possible homosexuality certainly suggest a reason to escape such a conservative nation). Planning to gain French citizenship via the Foreign Legion, he signs up, impressing his commanding officer in training before ending up assigned to a morally murky mission in the Niger Delta. It’s here that he will cross paths with our other hero – Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), a young and charismatic rebel militia leader who seeks to rid Nigeria of foreign influence and the destructive pollution it brings with it.
Abbruzzese’s central thesis – that the western world’s power and allure allows it to brutalise its old colonial holdings without even getting its own hands dirty – is a powerful one, but it’s given to us so opaquely that the impact is severely dimmed. Minimal dialogue and a really route one score of droning synths and pounding bass make it hard for Disco Boy to carve out its own identity, which is a real problem for any French Foreign Legion drama trying to separate itself from the monolithic influence of Beau Travail.
Any film with this subject matter is, inevitably, going to sit in the shadow of Claire Denis’s 1999 masterpiece and, while I would never expect a debut film to stack up against that (most filmmakers never could or will do so in their entire careers), Disco Boy invites the comparisons too readily. The homoerotic, dance-like training sequences (though here done in a grey and rainy corner of France instead of the bright and baking sun of Djibouti) bring it to mind early on. Though Abbruzzese does start to find his own stylistic niche once Aleksei reaches Nigeria with the burning, oil-slicked wetlands and a chaotic battle sequence done entirely through infrared vision, he rips Denis’s film’s ending off wholesale, failing to even approach the grandeur that he’s reaching for.
There’s also some supernatural stuff going on with Jomo’s sister, mesmeric dancer Udoka (Laetitia Ky), but it’s really half-hearted and ends up actually just getting in the way instead of adding the requisite intrigue. France’s malign continued influence over West Africa is one of the modern world’s great unanswered crimes but, in approaching it in such an alienatingly dreamlike manner, Disco Boy fails to really sink its teeth into its subject matter.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 