The Abyss

André Delvaux’s 1988 film adapts Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel, with a screenplay Delvaux wrote together with the author. In sixteenth-century Flanders under Spanish occupation, the Inquisition is at work. Zeno, a physician and alchemist wanted for what he has written, has spent twenty years moving through Europe under a false name and has not stopped refusing to conform. He returns to Bruges, where he was born, believing he has been forgotten, and in that silent labyrinth full of faces from his past he recovers his own identity and thereby signs his death warrant. Gian Maria Volonté plays Zeno. It competed at Cannes in 1988. Sami Frey and Anna Karina are also in it, in a Belgian-French co-production.