Dis­co Boy review – a bold yet banal char­ac­ter study

With Franz Rogows­ki hav­ing estab­lished him­self as one of the most sin­gu­lar and dis­tinc­tive Euro­pean act­ing tal­ents grac­ing the sil­ver screen today, and fol­low­ing his high­ly-laud­ed per­for­mance in Ira Sachs’ Pas­sages, it’s no sur­prise that audi­ence antic­i­pa­tion lev­els would be high at the prospect of anoth­er Rogows­ki-led dra­ma. In Gia­co­mo Abbruzzese’s fea­ture debut, Rogows­ki plays Alek­sei, a young Belaru­sian who, along with his ​“com­rade in mis­for­tune”, Mikhail (Michał Bal­ic­ki) seeks a new life in France, where he finds him­self trapped in a Faus­t­ian bar­gain. Cling­ing to the promise of a French pass­port, Alek­sei joins the French For­eign Legion, a mil­i­tary corp that grants its for­eign legion­naires a French nation­al­i­ty after three years of service.

Rogows­ki plays the strong-willed, tor­ment­ed Alek­sei with ner­vous ener­gy, apt­ly segue­ing between vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, fragili­ty and mut­ed machis­mo. Just as we’re about to be pulled into his nar­ra­tive, Abbruzzese shifts his gaze to a vil­lage in the Niger Delta, jux­ta­pos­ing the French For­eign Legion­naires with a guer­ril­la group fight­ing against the oil com­pa­nies that are threat­en­ing their locality’s sur­vival. This is where we meet Jomo (Morr Ndi­aye), the tit­u­lar Dis­co Boy, who we’re led to believe is Aleksei’s alter ego. With all the sub­tle­ty of a sledge­ham­mer, these par­al­lel nar­ra­tives serve to depict an image armed con­flict from shift­ing points of view, until the two men are faced with one anoth­er in the Niger­ian jun­gle, caus­ing their des­tinies to intertwine.

Jar­ring synths shift­ing in and out of phase with­in Vitalic’s dark, abra­sive score, form an impres­sive tapes­try of sound that works well with the film’s chore­o­graph­ic life force. This con­scious­ness roots itself in sequences of tra­di­tion­al, kines­thet­ic dance around bon­fires in Jomo’s vil­lage – most­ly through Jomo’s sis­ter Udo­ka (Laëti­tia Ky) – as well as sequences of the legion­naires’ night­club out­ings, train­ing exer­cis­es and assault cours­es (in one jar­ring sequence, the sol­diers are ordered by their gen­er­al to chant the lyrics of Édith Piaf’s ​‘Non, Je né regrette rien’ whilst march­ing in the cold). Com­par­isons to Beau Tra­vail are indeed inevitable, with Rogowski’s Alek­sei join­ing Denis Lavant’s Galoup in the Legion­naires Who Can Bust A Move Cin­e­mat­ic Universe.

Once he returns to France, Alek­sei is haunt­ed by Udo­ka – her pres­ence in the night­club that the legion­naires fre­quent along with her hyp­not­ic dance rou­tines begin to bend his grasp on real­i­ty. Although these hal­lu­ci­na­tions can be under­stood as Alek­sei going through PTSD, Udo­ka appears to be the sole human agent able to grant the film access to the pool of mag­i­cal real­ism. This marks a poten­tial ide­o­log­i­cal blindspot in Abbruzzese’s attempt to make a film about the very expe­ri­ence of oth­er­ness, in that it suc­cumbs to a depic­tion of African fem­i­nin­i­ty as a source of mys­tery and intrigue.

In the same way that, in the words of Edward Said, the Ori­ent func­tions as ​“the West’s sur­ro­gate and under­ground self”, Aleksei’s pre­car­i­ous rela­tion­ship with real­i­ty being enabled by the spec­tre of a silent African woman does lit­tle to under­mine the mythol­o­gy of Africa as a heart­land of mag­ic and prim­i­tivism, always seen in rela­tion to Europe, a place of ratio­nal­ism and moder­ni­ty. This isn’t to say that the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of Nige­ri­ans with­in the film is harm­ful, exoti­cised or ide­alised in any way; it’s sim­ply vague enough to cir­cum­vent those criticisms.

The inser­tion of a com­i­cal­ly smug Amer­i­can Vice jour­nal­ist sent to report on the guer­ril­la group as ​“the Niger­ian government’s biggest ene­my” fur­ther dis­tances the film­mak­er from dis­plays of such overt sen­sa­tion­al­ism. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Dis­co Boy is afflict­ed with the curse of try­ing to pack too much (in terms of both style and sub­stance) into its 92-minute run­time, ren­der­ing it inca­pable of say­ing much at all.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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