Berlin Review: Giacomo Abbruzzese’s ‘Disco Boy’

Bill Murray and star Jeannie Berlin set foot on the red carpet of the 2023 SAG Awards holding hands.Murray and Berlin appeared quite close when they arrived together for Sunday's soiree at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The star wore a black tuxedo with a colorful bow tie, while Berlin sported an all-black suit and shades.Berlin, who portrayed Hadassah Fabelman in the Steven Spielberg film, was there for the film's nomination in the Best Ensemble Cast in a Motion Picture category.

With the delicacy of a bee probing a flower for pollen, Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren picks her way through the tensions and dilemmas within a family where the youngest member, an 8-year-old boy called Aitor, is feeling his way toward a new identity as a girl. Sofia Otero, who deservedly won the Silver Bear for a lead performer at the Berlinale’s award night Saturday, shows an instinctive, unforced and generous understanding of how difficult her character’s life must be. As Coco – the between-stools nickname the family has devised to avoid anything too specifically gendered – Otero is alternately obstinate, tearful, mischievous and withdrawn. She craves her mother’s comprehension but pushes her away when she tries to talk to her about why she doesn’t want to go to school.  

Folk music icon Joan Baez, who’s now 82, came of age just as musicians’ live gigs were often recorded and thereby preserved for the record, virtues that are used to advantage in Joan Baez I Am A Noise. An up-close, intimate and mostly frank account of a career that arched across more than 60 years of musical and political expression while countless trends came and went, this elaborate documentary navigates adroitly through the professional and the personal aspects of a very full life, one marked by far more good fortune than bad. Whether you’ve followed her career for decades or are just now discovering her, the life under scrutiny is undeniably impressive and ceaselessly engaging.

Christoph Hochhäusler’s slow-burn urban noir Till the End of the Night starts with time-lapse footage of the film’s first set, a well-to-do and apparently lived-in apartment flat, being built from scratch out of an empty room. Sadly, what looks to be challenging piece of Brechtian deconstruction is literally a plot point, as well as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the layers of deceit in the story that follows.

At certain times in Emily Atef’s eponymous adaptation of Daniela Krien’s novel “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” all one can hear is the irregular breathing of Maria (Marlene Burow). The molecules of oxygen leave the sprawling fields of rural Germany and hastily make their way through the young girl’s lungs, the surge of adrenaline in her bloodstream directly increasing the frequency of respiration.

The films of Jennifer Reeder have an unmistakable vibe. Her acclaimed short films, including “All Small Bodies” and “Crystal Lake,” have been shown on The Criterion Channel, and her feature film “Knives and Skin” has been shown at Berlin and Tribeca.  READ MORE: ‘Inside’ Review: Vasilis Katsoupis’ Heist Thriller With Willem Dafoe Is Formulaic Yet Never Dull [Berlin] Reeder’s films, which have been described as the meeting point between David Lynch and John Hughes, share little in terms of plot, but all bear an unmistakable eeriness, an otherworldliness that could only be Reeder.

Odd people turn up in deserts. People are also inclined to disappear. A strange moonscape of opal prospectors’ digs and slurry heaps helps to set a bleak mood in Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen’s Limbo, shot in gently faded black and white in the South Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, repurposed here as Limbo. Limbo, says the preacher whose radio show seems to be the only thing available on the local airwaves, is the edge of hell. Here, unpurged sinners may be “in friendship with God.” Damnation, however, isn’t far away.

Naman Ramachandran Berlin’s just concluded European Film Market (EFM), which had a physical edition this year after two online editions in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic, has reported “record results” according to the organizers. There were 230 stands and 612 companies from 78 countries and more than 11,500 market participants from 132 countries. Some 773 films were shown in 1,533 screenings, including 647 online screenings and 599 market premieres. The total number of buyers also rose to 1,302. 629 film projects were presented on the new Producers & Project Pages. “After the past two irregular years, we’re pleased to return to the physical in full force, and with a vibrant, bustling and strong market. The exhibition areas at Gropius Bau and the Marriott Hotel were sold out, and the exhibitors reported strong sales and good business. The decision to group all the market happenings together with the Berlinale Series Market and the market screenings at Potsdamer Platz, and to provide the industry with an efficient infrastructure, was extremely well-received by our market participants,” said EFM director Dennis Ruh.

Donna Summer could hit notes more thrillingly beautiful than any other pop singer of her time, or since. I’m not sure even Whitney Houston, as great as she was, quite reached the glistening heights that culminate “Last Dance” (though she comes very close in “I Will Always Love You”). Mariah Carey (no relation to me) performs impressive vocal acrobatics, yet to my ear she can’t match the bell-like shimmer of Donna in the higher registers. And Donna in the lower registers – well, the voice thrums with visceral resonance.

With her feature debut, “The Chambermaid,” Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés materialized a graceful character study of a hardworking mother. Though enriched via the meaningful interjections of its supporting players, the narrative had a singular focus.

Willem Dafoe gets a dream role with Inside, a combo of art film in more ways than one, psychological thriller, heist movie, and survival tale all rolled into one in which Dafoe’s Nemo is center stage, alone, the entire time.

War is coming in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, onscreen and off. But despite the media’s best efforts to turn the casting of British, non-Jewish actor Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir into an explosive example of cultural appropriation, both Nattiv’s direction and Mirren’s performance are low-key and careful enough to rise above the controversy. In retrospect, it does seem a little strange that no other candidate was deemed suitable, and the movie won’t do much extra business on account of Mirren’s star power, but those anticipating a tone-deaf disaster will be sorely disappointed.

The audiences at Berlin International Film Festival tend to be respectful and engaged.

Young Belarusian Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) is impatient for a better life in Europe. Coming from a country under dictatorship and with very strong Russian ties, the political isolation of which has made it suffocating for the younger generations, he is seduced by the idea of a borderless, communal whole where everybody counts for something.

Femme, a queer thriller written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and stars George Mackay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. The film explores the price of vengeance, the toll it can take on the psyche, and how that pressure can lead to some questionable decisions that may leave the viewer looking for explanations for these character’s actions.

Guy Lodge Film Critic 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.

For almost four years of siege in the 1990s, the city of Sarajevo concussed from shelling, the rumblings of armored vehicles and the repeated pop of sniper fire.

“They treat you like a movie star,” says an admirer to Ingeborg Bachmann at one of her celebrated readings. She smiles graciously and agrees, thus establishing the baseline for her story.

Most big Korean action movies are backloaded, wrapping up with three to five endings, but Byun Sung-hyun’s Kill Boksoon, which premiered as a Berlinale Special, has everything going on up front. So much so that it initially seems too much, to the extent that it sometimes feels as though there’s actually a mini-series in there bursting to get out. Surprisingly, that’s not such a crazy idea, since, once you get past the far-fetched premise—an underground network of professional contract killers, presided over the glossy conglomerate MK Ent—there’s a lot of rich character work to supplement the superbly choregraphed violence that we’ve come to expect from the region.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Paris-based Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese says making the Berlin Film Festival competition cut with his first feature, “Disco Boy,” which toplines German star Franz Rogowski (“Passages,” ”Undine”), is “certainly a dream come true.” But he also points out that his remarkable debut was a long time coming.  A graduate of several film schools, including France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy, Abbruzzese started developing “Disco Boy” in 2013 following an encounter in a French disco with a classical dancer who had been a soldier.