A Dream of Fair Women

In the flickering twilight of 1920s modernity, four sylphs plucked from a deluge of 75,000 aspirants step through the celluloid veil into a diaphanous dreamscape where pulchritude itself is currency, myth, trap. Virginia Brown Faire, Anita Booth, Blanche McGarrity and the eponymous Virginia Brown drift across a studio Eden of muslin clouds and mercury mirrors, their mirrored smiles refracting Tennyson’s verse like light through cut glass. Each frame is a stanza: a lake of silver nitrate becomes the Lady of Shalott’s mirror; a parade of paparazzi flashbulbs mutates into the fiery arrows of Ida’s siege; the contest’s velvet ribbon transfigures into the yoke of the ‘fair women’ who must dance upon the knife-edge between being seen and being devoured. Intertitles, half-Gladys Hall gossip column, half-Tennysonian lament, whisper of beauty’s ‘fatal gift’ as the quartet negotiates a carnival of sculptors, journalists, and louche muses who wish to chisel, headline or seduce them into immortality. One sequence dissolves from a close-up of rose-petal lips to a sculptor’s hand gouging marble: the same gesture, the same violence. Another juxtaposes a winner’s coronation with a waxwork museum after-hours, her plaster double grinning in the moonlight—an eerie prefiguration of stardom’s embalming. The film’s final act abandons narrative for oneiric tableaux: the women walk into a lake of literalized moonlight, their gowns ballooning like jellyfish while intertitles quote ‘The dreamer dies, but the dream lives on.’ They do not drown; they become negative space, silhouettes for the spectator’s desire to inhabit, a visual koan on the consumable feminine.