Director: Geoffroy C. Dedenis
Writer: Geoffroy C. Dedenis
Cast: Romi Debart
Running time: 26mins
Jerky footage of tree branches against a night sky, a strident metal soundtrack fill the open moments of Abaddon – overly familiar tropes of experimental film that do not augur well for the rest of the movie. Thankfully, I can report that the open sequence is the only blemish on what is a remarkable piece of cinema.
Geoffroy C. Dedenis is a young French director who has previously made several short films. For the enigmatically titled short feature Abaddon, Dedenis obtained funding from an arts organisation – the production values are superb throughout. As to the title, it might be an arcane cultural reference which I am not familiar with or even a play on English language street argot – a bad ‘un – I am none the wiser.
Abaddon is a challenging piece of work that involves a graphic depiction of self-harm. For IFL readers who feel they would be uncomfortable with the subject matter, I would suggest that they might be best to not watch the film and not read on as this review will discuss the self-harm sequence in some detail.
The movie depicts events in the life of Gaspard, a young gay man who sells sex for money – as the story unfolds this attribute appears to be a key part of Gaspard’s identity. Gaspard is played by Romi Debart who puts in a strong performance – so strong that even though the script portrays the character as somewhat unpleasant Debart makes the audience empathise with them.
The director uses three techniques to build the picture. There is an omniscient narrator who tells us Gaspard’s inner thought processes, flashback scenes involving Gaspard’s childhood experiences and graphic depictions of three sexual encounters that the character undertakes. The latter are intended to illustrate Gaspard’s emotional response to sexual desire and to human relationships.
Dedenis weaves the strands together so adroitly that after watching Abaddon, I felt as though I had read a tightly paced, beautifully written novella. Astonishingly, Dedenis successfully inserts into the story two non-human actors that I came to be fascinated by – Gaspard’s bedsit where almost all the action takes place and a malfunctioning fridge.
Baldly put, the plot line is as follows. Gaspard has a polite, emotion free commercial sexual encounter. Gaspard then has a passionate sexual encounter during which he declares his love for his sexual partner – aghast – I am not into that sort of thing – the partner puts on his clothes and abruptly leaves. Gaspard is left distraught. In the third sex scene, one of Gaspard’s customers opines that he would like to have a non-commercial relationship with him – Gaspard sneers and mocks him. Gaspard goes on to have an emotional crisis in which he slits (rather than slashes – the act is performed almost surgically) his wrists. There is a turn and finally an apotheosis.
By focusing so intently on the sexual activity and how it shapes the interpersonal relationships, the director asks us to question the nature of power in sexual and emotional sensibilities – whether there is any meaning to the relationship between love and sex. In the milieu of the sex trade, Gaspard has erotic capital – Debart is an extraordinary beautiful young person and brings charisma to the portrayal. The issue we are prompted to consider is a perennial one – OK erotic capital brings power but not necessarily contentment and emotional well-being.
Dedenis utilises the production funding to great effect. The cinematography led by Maille Corbelit Paradis is efficient throughout and, at times, aided by some wonderful editing, is stunning. Armand Lesecq’s original soundtrack despite the too strident and precipitate opening sequence drives the mood throughout and creates a powerful atmosphere of Romantic angst. An important ingredient in the movie is the quality of the lighting and set dressing. The action takes places in Gaspard’s spartan bedsit with the self-harm scene set in the bathroom. For each scene, the colours of the main room change magically to reflect Gaspard’s psychic disintegration. The colours contrast vividly with the monochrome of the bathroom – which, by the way is one of the grimiest bathrooms you will ever see in a movie and will be bring hope and reassurance to any slovenly house cleaners out there.
Abaddon has three pieces of virtuoso technique to look out for.
The scene where Gaspard declares his love to his partner. Prior to this, Dedenis gives us one of the memory footages (they are all shot in soft focus) – looking down on to a pair of roller blades as the skater traverses a bridge. A crash – cut to a hospital x-ray room where a medic shows Gaspard a set of x-rays and points out a double fracture of the wrist. Ouch. Cut to the bedsit and the x-rays are hanging on the wall above the mattress on which the couple are fucking. The room is lit with subdued red tones; therefore, our eyes inevitably are drawn to the ghostly blues of the x-rays. In a masterly piece of editing and I assume CGI enhancement, the images of the couple appear to be sometimes in front of the x-rays and sometimes behind them. Memories have melded into the reality of the present. As the couple has sex, their images appear to merge into one another and then separate – giving the sequence the feeling of an erotic ballet.
When Gaspard rejects the opportuning client, the director begins with the camera showing us the ceiling of the room. The camera tracks down to show us Gaspard head, then his torso and then the head of the client who is fellating Gaspard. The composition is simply done but the result is both shocking and humorous.
The apotheosis. A figure, we assume it is Gaspard, walks through the woods at night with their back to us. They are wearing a bright white top with dark trousers and a dark throw around their neck. As the figure recedes into the distance, the nighttime background fades into deep black and all we see is the strange image of the white shirt which becomes a disembodied shape. The white then changes back and forth white to yellow and we are left wondering whether we are looking up at a star in the heavens – but the shape is so strangely proportioned that I guessed I might be looking at a decayed tooth.
Whatever – these three sequences will stay in my memory for a long while.
The fridge. The plain, white good sits incongruously open with a towel on the floor to catch the water throughout the film – a quotidian object but by its failure to function we are constantly drawn to it – to interrogate it. Dedenis uses the object as a metaphor – a sign of Gaspard’s inability to cope with external reality – and here the director uses the narrator’s voice to explore Gaspard’s inner thoughts. On a couple of occasions, we see Gaspard obsessively hacking with a long knife at the residue ice created by the machine’s malfunction. The narrator helpfully informs us – All roads led to deception – the freezer provided the last vestige of functionality – he had to pay to the sadistic divinity which controlled his life and the rest of the world – murdering his Snow Queen with the monstrous knife. In an alternative universe, the narrator’s words would make for a tremendous script to a household appliance advertisement.
Dedenis later fuses Gaspard’s feelings of betrayal as to the freezer malfunctioning – the murdered Snow Queen – with Gaspard’s violent self-loathing. After Gaspard slices his wrists open, he lets the blood drip into the melted water of the Snow Queen – possibly blood truly is thicker than water.
The screenplay is particularly sharp as to the narrator’s voice but is excellent throughout. Gaspard has some terrific one-liners – dry and bitter. My favourite line in the script came in an enigmatic scene where Gaspard is sitting on the mattress with two visitors – for an unexplained reason one has Tic and the other has Tac written on their foreheads. Again, for an unknown reason, Tac has blank zombie eyes. Tac remarks out of the ether to Gaspard– did you know Mao Tse Tung was a librarian? Superb – like something out of Godard in his prime.
There is so much packed in to Abaddon, I have only been able to scratch the surface and note a few examples that stand out – it is remarkable to think the movie has a running time of just 25 minutes or so – it teems with ideas.
With Abaddon, Dedenis has given us indy filmmaking near its best. I would certainly look forward to new submissions from them in the future. In the covering letter, I see that the movie has won awards for LBGTQ+ filmmaking – which is great, but I hope that it does not get categorised as simply an LBGTQ+ film. What Dedenis has to say about power and sexual desire is so universally resonant – this beautiful piece of cinema deserves as wide an audience as possible.
For IFL readers, if you can come to terms with the subject matter, try and catch Abaddon and try and catch it at a festival with a decent screen and sound system – it will not disappoint.