DISCO BOY TBC
Anew talent takes to the floor…
★★★★★ OUT 29 MARCH CINEMAS
An oblique reflection on identity, colonialism and undocumented migration, this heady, sometimes hallucinogenic feature debut from France-based Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese will frustrate some with its tantalising mirror images, cosmic coincidences and untied narrative threads. Give yourself up to its rhythms, though, and you’ll be lost in a trance.
Travelling into Poland for a football match, Belarusians Aleksei (Passages’ Franz Rogowski) and Mikhail (Michal Balicki) make a break for France, where Aleksei joins the French Foreign Legion. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) leads an insurgent paramilitary group. The paths of Jomo and Aleksei cross when members of the French Foreign Legion go on an infiltration mission in the Niger Delta to free French hostages. Their coming together, shot in infrared night vision like a disco dance of death, sets off strange ripples of behaviour in Aleksei, a breakdown of sorts that’s empowering and liberating.
Throughout, Rogowski is a hypnotic presence. His features are resolute as he undergoes rigorous training, then opaque as he trawls the clubs of Paris upon returning, hollowed and haunted, from the Niger Delta. There’s a sensuality to the German actor that chimes with DoP Hélène Louvart’s luminous images and French DJ Vitalic’s pulsing electronic score, as Abbruzzese openly invites comparisons to Claire Denis’ shimmering French Legionnaire classic, Beau Travail (1999). Fascinating.
THE VERDICT Abbruzzese’s talent blazes like a neon strobe light, his elliptical debut throwing new, throbbing shapes.
Franz Rogowski gives a mesmerising performance
SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING TBC
The quirks of being awallflower…
★★★★★ OUT 19 APRIL CINEMAS
Fran (Daisy Ridley) has a secret obsession: her own death. The socially awkward office worker’s imagination is swamped with suicidal ideations involving slithering pythons, car crashes and ants crawling busily over sallow skin.
As grim as these fantasies may be, they are a lot more vivid than her bleak reality: a life spent shuffling paperwork in a shabby workplace sited somewhere on the dreary Oregon coast. But then she meets Robert (Dave Merheje), an affable new colleague who makes it his mission to pop her bubble of isolation.
A Sundance indie tuned to a deliberately muted key, Rachel Lambert’s quiet romance is a symphony of uncomfortable silences that requires producer/star Ridley to hide her light beneath the thickest of bushels. Its charm lies in watching Fran slowly blossom under Robert’s attentive ministrations, a nervous night at the pictures (followed by pie) paving the way for a subsequent murder party at which she reveals a flair for ghoulish storytelling.
Given that the 2019 short it’s expanded from ran a mere 12 minutes, there’s a definite sense here of material being extended beyond its elasticity. Yet it’s a decent vehicle for Ridley that, like last year’s The Marsh King’s Daughter, shows that she doesn’t need a galaxy far, far away to demonstrate her star (Wars) power.
THE VERDICT There’s more to life than death in this affecting portrait of a morbid lonely soul.