The German dancer Franz Rogowski entered the cinema like a hurricane: his brutal skinhead in ‘Victoria’ (2015) and his unforgettable karaoke scene in ‘Chandelier’ in ‘Happy End’ (2017), made him one of the most requested from European cinema. Christian Petzold, Terrence Malick and Ira Sachs have been some of the directors who have had him.
2024 promises to be his year: he is the protagonist of Andrea Arnold’s new film, ‘Bird’ (2024), and has been signed by Hollywood (by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B), where he has filmed ‘Wizards!’, the latest from David Michod (‘The King’, ‘Animal Kingdom’).
Well, Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut has the same overwhelming energy as the performances of Rogowski, its protagonist. ‘Disco Boy’ is a gale of sensations, a fascinating story of immigration, colonialism and magical-religious dances, impregnated with sensuality, mystery and lyricism.
A magnetic cross between ‘Apocalypse Now’ and the cinema of Claire Denis, which becomes a powerful aesthetic experience thanks to the award-winning photography of Helene Louvart (the frequent photographer of Alice Rohrwacher or Eliza Hittman), a fabulous sound design and the atmospheric and pulsating soundtrack by Vitalic.
‘Disco Boy’ is a film full of creativity and staging ideas: the way of filming the bodies, full of physicality and sensuality; the sequence filmed with the infrared camera, endowed with a strange poetics; the visual rhymes with the three rivers that appear in the film, of great narrative relevance; and the dance scenes, soaked in melancholy, mysticism and a hypnotic and lysergic electricity, which draws heavily stylistically from the cinema of Gaspar Noé or Nicolas Winding Refn.
In short, an enormously ambitious debut (it took the director 10 years to make the film), of extraordinary audiovisual strength and narratively very stimulating, open to multiple readings, which illuminates a very promising filmmaker, of whom we will surely hear about in the future .
