Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese makes a really stylish debut with Disco Boy, a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self. This is bold film-making: a movie that wants to dazzle you with its standalone setpieces, but also to carry you along with its storytelling.
Franz Rogowski, a German actor who always brings a compelling sort of chemical instability to his films (like a piece of smoking sodium exposed to the air), here plays Aleksei, a guy from Belarus who has arrived in Poland with his buddy Mikhail (Michal Balicki) and a bunch of other Belarus nationals on a short tourist visa, supposedly to see a football match. But first chance they get, these two sneak off the bus, hitch a lift from a friendly truck driver heading west and then get into France, a terrifyingly dangerous and illegal journey across water which is to have an eerie echo with Aleksei’s professional life. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe – in Nigeria in fact – Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) is a charismatic guerrilla fighter who with his sister Udoka (Laetitia Ky), leads an insurgent paramilitary group in the Niger Delta: the two have a strange identifying mark: different coloured eyes.
