Angelo Raaijmakers | I, Adonis / 2021

reforming a body

by Douglas Messerli

 

Angelo Raaijmakers (screenwriter and director) I, Adonis / 2021 [14 minutes]

 

Dutch director Angelo Raaijmakers short film I, Adonis is a gruesome little horror tale of a gorgeous young boy and a handsome young man, both trying to hide from the beauty of their body.

 

     As an adult Nicky (Hein van Rooij), a trim young man, who having worked out regularly, has a fairly decent pectoral development. But Nicky is clearly dissatisfied with the results, working out constantly, eating precise amounts of fatless chicken and egg whites. He works out in gym filled with monstrous overly-developed older men who skin has turned brown and is covered with tattoos, the best looking of them being Carlos (Dennis van Beusekom). None of these men might be described as even slightly attractive.

      But then Raaijmakers film is not about gay men, to whom the young Nicky might seem most appealing, evidence of which we get a hint when one of his trainers appears to be looking in at him as he dresses through a curtain. This young “Adonis” would rather be the monsters who surround him, with muscle mass and pectoral development that his frame could never possibly support.

      In the period in which we observe his workouts, in fact, he gains weight, loses muscle mass and is put on a new three-week regimen by his trainer (Bart Harder).

 

     We soon discover the reason of his strange obsession, albeit a rather hokey one. As a lovely long blonde-haired child his mother, obviously having desired a girl instead of a boy, clothes him each day in dresses, for which he is understandably mocked by his classmates. We realize, accordingly, that the issue that haunts him is one gender, not sexual desire. Having mistaken muscles as representing the ideal male anatomy, our young fitness freak is determined to find himself a body that will represent everything that his mother had attempted to deny him.

      Despite his normative good looks, Nicky, however, is totally unhappy, carefully slicing up his breast of chicken and picking out any yellow yolk that might have fallen into his egg whites, but which apparently cannot feed his hunger.

  

    In total frustration finally, he returns home from the gym where he has imagined all the men having turned toward him to laugh, takes up the large cutting knife and puts it to his breast, slicing open a large wound into which he stuffs with the raw chicken, delusionally imagining that it will directly provide the upper muscle mass he is missing. Blood runs from the wound across the kitchen counter as we watch him, from the back, hunched over pushing the cut-up pieces into the deep recess one-by-one before the screen goes black.

 

Los Angeles, December 5, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).