“Disco Boy”, a crossroads of languages ​​in the film in which dancing becomes an escape from hell – Corriere.it

To face the Berlin competition, Italy fielded Giacomo Abbruzzese, director of “Disco Boy», however produced with a French majority and with a German interpreter, Franz Rogowski, who speaks Russian and French in the film. A crossroads of nationalities and languages ​​that is well suited to a film that is difficult to grasp, born from the fascination for classical dance where beauty comes from an absolute discipline and which on the screen is transformed into the body of a soldier, whose efficiency is born precisely by the strictest discipline.

In the film the body is that of a volunteer enlisted in the Foreign Legion, the only way illegal immigrant Aleksei (Rogowski) has to find an identity after fleeing his native Belarus. But when he is sent on a mission to Niger and clashes with the leader of the local rebels, he and the film undergo a radical mutation: the naturalistic style used until then becomes visionary (the close combat of the two is filmed with a thermal camera, losing definition and gaining in abstractness) to arrive at an even more dreamlike third part.

The ambitions are clear: to look at the different, to the «enemy», as something repelling and at the same time complicit, involving him in a dance (as happens in the finale, with the rebel’s sister) which is both an approach and an escape from the hell of reality. It is a pity that the direction ends up not controlling the staging sufficiently and letting itself be a little too fascinated by his visual inventions, thus losing lucidity.