‘Disco Boy’ Review: Franz Rogowski Does ‘Beau Travail’ in a Dreamy Legionnaire Odyssey
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature is a hazily seductive, frequently dreamlike study of life in the French Foreign Legion, fixated on masculine bodies in synchronized and sometimes violently clashing motion.
It is also called “Disco Boy.” You almost certainly wouldn’t choose that subject, tone and title for a film if you didn’t want viewers’ minds to immediately wander to “Beau Travail,” Claire Denis’ seminal Foreign Legion cine-ballet, with its climactic solo number set to a thumping Eurodance classic; even if you somehow made that error, you wouldn’t compound it with electro-scored terpsichorean interludes of your own.
Choosing homage this direct for a first feature is a brazen move, but notwithstanding its openly derivative qualities, “Disco Boy” doesn’t want for boldness or surprise — Abbruzzese’s hot, fluxional command of sound and image keeps us curious.
One feature of “Disco Boy,” at least, plays as expected: the reliably fragile, fascinating presence of Franz Rogowski, the gifted German actor who, of late, seems to have evolved into a border-busting mascot for European cinema at its most sinuous and supple.
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