Coming off one of the best performances of the year in Ira Sachs’ Passages, Franz Rogowski will next be seen in Giacomo Abbruzzese’s stylish debut Disco Boy, which picked up the Silver Bear at Berlinale earlier this year and was a New Directors/New Films selection. Acquired by Big World Pictures, who will release it on February 2 in NYC at the Quad and February 9 in LA at Laemmle Theaters, they’ve now debuted the new trailer and poster.
Here’s the synopsis: “Aleksei is a young Belarusian on the run from a past he must bury. In a form of Faustian pact, he becomes a member of the French Foreign Legion in exchange for the promise of French citizenship. Far away, in the Niger Delta, Jomo is a revolutionary activist, engaged in armed struggle to defend his community. Aleksei is a soldier, Jomo a guerrilla fighter. Because of one more senseless war, their destinies will intertwine.”
David Katz said in his review, “Disco Boy’s core theme is globalization, really, or the contingent woe we all share, through the violence of borders, forced migration, and enduring armed combat, even if no country has officially declared war. (Both in these generalized themes, and its frantic stylistic flexing, we’re reminded of Iñárritu, with a bit of dread.) Joining the Légion étrangère is a route to French citizenship for the Belarusian Aleksei (Rogowski), rather than a symbol of France’s wilting Napoleonic legacy as it is in Denis’ film. Hiding with a bunch of rowdy football fans to cross the border into Poland (and thus the European Union and its Schengen area), he has a traveling partner Mikhail (Michał Balicki) with what seems to be the same purpose; he tragically drowns as he makes his course, which can (cynically) be read as providing a bit of guilt to prop up Aleksei’s plot arc.”
See the trailer below.
Disco Boy opens on February 2 in NYC at the Quad and February 9 at Laemmle Theaters in LA.