THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” − NOT TO BE MISSED
Of disco boyan intriguing first feature film, awarded a Silver Bear for its “outstanding artistic contribution” during the Berlinale in February, it would be hard to attribute any provenance, to him whose story begins by crossing the border between Belarus and Poland, transits through Paris, bounces through the Niger delta, to s finished under the vaults of a church transformed into a nightclub.
Its director Giacomo Abbruzzese, 39, a native of Puglia in Italy, graduated from Le Fresnoy, art school in Tourcoing (North), and lives between Paris and Madrid. French, Italian, Belgian and Polish production, disco boy takes advantage of being an unsituable film, the harbinger of a post-national fiction that aims to say something about the world, betting everything on a regime that passes walls and leaps borders. Sinuous, the story takes unexpected detours, changing skin almost at each sequence.
It all starts on board a bus of overheated Belarusian supporters, on their way to an away match, where two undercover friends take advantage of the passage to the European Union to take the tangent towards France. Only Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) will manage to make his way there, where he is found haggard and in tatters on the Alexandre-III bridge in Paris. Destitute, he joins the Foreign Legion.
A stall then propels us to southern Nigeria, where an eco-terrorist militia, under the banner Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, claims a natural territory invaded by foreign oil exploitations. A Western hostage-taking triggers the intervention of a legionary battalion, where we find Aleksei, who, during the operation, eliminates in hand-to-hand combat the rebel leader Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), a young villager with odd eyes. Back in Paris, he comes across his victim’s sister, Udoka (Laetitia Ky), who performs as a dancer on the stage of a nightclub, recognizable by the same heterochromic gaze.
A logic of sensations
disco boy thus orchestrates, underground, the momentary telescoping of two characters, strangers to each other, simply strangers, brought together by the motive of a war that is not really theirs, as two orphan lines can be brought to cross. The film initially seems to confuse the issue with its cut-and-dried editing and its laconic ellipses reminiscent of a certain auteur cinema called, pejoratively, “festival” for informed spectators. But something, right from the start, holds the attention: the singular force of the plan, an entity in which Giacomo Abbruzzese clearly believes, which works a lot on a logic of sensations.
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