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Set in Poland in the year 1670, Netflix’s latest offering of the same name chronicles the account of Jan Pawel, a Polish nobleman. For as long as he could remember, Jan Pawel (Bartlomiej Topa) had only one dream: to go down in history as the most famous man in Poland. Jan had three children: Stanislaw (Michal Balicki), Jakub (Michal Sikorski), and Aniela (Martyna Byczkowska). As for his wife, Zofia (Katarzyna Herman), she wasn’t someone you would call to rejuvenate your boring party. She was more like the lost soul of a dead person, endlessly tormenting a man, as Jan Pawel stated on multiple occasions. They had very little in common except their shared hatred for their neighbor, Andrzej, who owned a bigger half of their village.

Spoilers Ahead

Why Did Jan Pawel Hate Andrzej?

Andrzej was just another landowner, like Jan Pawel, who wanted to raise the taxes given...

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,...

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,...

To be blunt about it, we’re reaching the sad, maybe inevitable stage where Beau Travail and its famous closing sequence are becoming subject to the dreaded “Seinfeld Effect,” coined to note where the original value of something is diminished by successive imitations. It’s not that Denis’ film and Denis Levant’s death dance would ever lose their impact for those new or returning to it, but that a prospective viewer could see a weaker future rendering or a jaded, comic social-media reference to the scene first, and then afterward eventually seek out Beau Travail, greeting it with a bit of a “huh, that’s where that’s from” or underwhelmed reaction.

To Disco Boy’s credit, while its core themes and imagery are second-hand, it does attempt to build, expand on, perhaps modernize Beau Travail, not unlike Helena Wittmann’s recent Human Flowers of Flesh, which premiered last...

What do a Belarusian emigrant and an African freedom fighter have in common? It’s a question that Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut, which had its world premiere in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, answers in a beguilingly magic-realist and digressive way that sort of adds up, even though it requires a lot of good faith from the viewer to make it do so. To illustrate its strangeness, Disco Boy could be loosely described as a mash-up of Beau Travail and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, two very different movies. While both are firmly anchored in arthouse history, neither resembles the other, and it’s that contrast—the rich potential opened up by the space in between—that’s in play here.

The opening, which serves as a kind of mood-setting overture, presents a vision of sleeping Black men in a primitive natural environment. We then...

Giacomo Abbruzzese’s drama follows Belarusian Aleksei on his journey into the French Foreign Legion and a very strange epiphany in the Niger Delta

Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese makes a really stylish debut with Disco Boy, a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self. This is bold film-making: a movie that wants to dazzle you with its standalone setpieces, but also to carry you along with its storytelling.

Franz Rogowski, a German actor who always brings a compelling sort of chemical instability to his films (like a piece of smoking sodium exposed to the air), here plays Aleksei, a guy from Belarus who has arrived in Poland with his buddy Mikhail (Michal Balicki) and a bunch of other Belarus nationals on a short tourist visa, supposedly to see a football match.

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. Big World Pictures releases the film in select theaters on Friday, February 2 with expansion to follow.

It might be reductive to call “Disco Boy” a kind of club kid cousin to “Beau Travail,” but the comparisons aren’t entirely off. Like Claire Denis’ Sight and Sound chart-topper, here is a tour with the French Foreign Legion, another dissection of colonial roleplaying spent among a taciturn lot who find best expression in the rhythms of the night. So let’s dispense those comparisons up front, and with a degree of military efficiency befitting both films: While director Giacomo Abbruzzese does indeed pay homage to a direct artistic forbearer, his debut film stands (and writhes and shimmies) all on its own.

Pushed and pulled by another intensely physical Franz Rogowski turn, “Disco Boy” follows a man ever on the move,...