Disco Boy (Bright Horizons)

Rating:

Key Cast: Max Geller, Michal Balicki, Morr Ndiaye
Director: Giacomo Abbruzzese
Producer: Lionel Massol, Marco Alessi, Pauline Seigland
Screenwriter: Giacomo Abbruzzese
Cinematographer: Hélène Louvart
Composer: Vitalic
Company Credit: Distributor: Madman Entertainment

Viewer Advice: Contains stroboscopic imagery, strong impact themes.

Franz Rogowski (also starring in MIFF 2023 film Passages) propels this mesmeric musing on wounded masculinity, which is ignited by French electro superstar Vitalic’s feverish soundtrack.

In Giacomo Abbruzzese’s sensorially and emotionally arresting debut dramatic feature, Rogowski delivers a tremendous central performance as Alex. The rogue Belarusian harbours dreams of slipping unnoticed across the French border, but the aspiration soon sours. Stumbling from terrible loss into the arms of the French Foreign Legion suggests a future, but all-encompassing grief and cruel fate throw Alex headlong into the path of another lost soldier (played by astounding newcomer Morr Ndiaye), binding him to the past.

Premiering in competition at the Berlinale, this luminous story of outsiders adrift in Paris secured cinematographer Hélène Louvart the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution. Having worked with titans of French cinema Agnès Varda and Claire Denis as well as on Alice Rohrwacher’s MIFF 2018 favourite Happy as Lazzaro, she brings an incandescent colour to Abbruzzese’s sensorially bold film. Sitting somewhere between Denis’s Beau Travail (MIFF 2000) and the kinetic whirlwind of Gaspar Noé (Climax, MIFF 2018; Enter the Void, MIFF 2015), Disco Boy is simply ethereal.

“A visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness … that wants to dazzle you with its standalone setpieces, but also to carry you along with its storytelling.” – The Guardian