When Arnold Schwarzenegger enters the interstellar fighter’s thermal imaging crosshairs in Predator, his steely muscles, armament and image of the invincible movie hero Schwarzenegger nothing left. What remains is his life energy, the blood that rushes through his veins. Tender 37 degrees that can be scattered in the cold jungle with a precisely set stroke of two extendable blades.
It was a simplistic and all the more effective image for a superpower interfering in the development of countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador after defeat in Vietnam – by force if necessary. The Predator turned the tables.
What served as the starting signal for action fireworks in John McTiernan’s 1987 sci-fi action film is set in a new context in the Berlinale contribution Disco Boy, until the film sinks into a hypnotic dream. The partly trance-like mix of war film and Franz Rogowski idolatry (a lucrative art-house genre in its own right) dances stylishly through the purgatory of violence.
Service in the Foreign Legion promises a new life in Disco Boy
Rogowski (Transit, Große Freiheit) plays the Belarusian Aleksei, who wants to travel to France with a friend via secret routes. You long for that Entry into the French Foreign Legion. It promises a new identity, a residence permit and maybe a passport at some point.
However, the journey to rebirth begins at death. While crossing the Oder, Aleksei’s friend disappears under the water. Arriving in France, Aleksei becomes Alex, a model recruit who meets physical exertion with a Zen-like calm. Then the mission in Nigeria calls.
Film’s Grand Huit
disco boy
As in Predator, Disco Boy Hostages rescued from a rebel group become. Their leader Jomo (Morr N’Diaye) is diametrically opposed to the identity converter Alex. While one flees precarious circumstances to start a new life, Jomo defends his village against oil companies that leave the surrounding mangrove swamps as a poisoned wasteland. Aleksei leaves name and origin behind, Jomo is deeply rooted in the rites of his ancestors. They meet in the nocturnal jungle, which culminates in the somewhat early climax of the film.
What the trance-like war movie has to do with the sci-fi action in Predator
The Thermal imaging camera observes the two bodies in the dark. Like Schwarzenegger and his crew in Predator, this robs them of their looks and their uniforms. In McTiernan’s classic, this perspective resulted in pragmatic questions of survival (how to become invisible?). In Disco Boy it serves as a means of exaggeration. As red and orange areas in front of a dark background, Aleksei and Jomo blur in their mutual struggle for survival. It is an image of massive abstraction that robs people of their individuality and reduces them to what they have in common: life.
Directing debutant Giacomo Abbruzzese follows an unforgettable Image of disturbing beauty and destruction after another to formulate relatively simple truths. Franz Rogowski being blown away on a rope high above the jungle landscape consumed by oil and fire. Rogowski, who is haunted by his opponent’s ghost while he is drunk. Rogowski! Rogowski! Rogowski!
Film’s Grand Huit
disco boy
The German actor and darling of the international auteur film between Terrence Malick and Christian Petzold serves as a multi-layered reflection surface for the visual ideas of his director and cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Pina, Never Rarely Sometimes Always).
In essence, Aleksei or Alex is less a character than the idea of a character, but his emotional world remains tangible in the film, which lacks dialogue. Rogowski runs, swims, crawls, shoots and dances his way through a film and grabs him like that. Other actors would be overwhelmed by the neon worlds reminiscent of Nicolas Winding Refn (Only God Forgives), Rogowski thrives in theirs. With the debutant Morr N’Diaye, he has a charismatic counterpart at his side, whose character from the screenplay deserves more attention.
But that can be said about some aspects of Disco Boy, which is overwhelming in the radical simplicity of some images, but mostly remembered as this: A film of spectacular moments, leading to an overly simplistic resolution. Next to Disco Boy, Predator comes across as a sophisticated treatise on US imperialism.