Summary
Sunflower petals drift like bruised gold across the crumbling porticos of Trieste, where Erzsi B. Marton’s nameless painter—gamine, gaunt, luminous—stalks the Adriatic twilight clutching canvases that bleed amber and rust. She has come to exhume a lover lost to the Great War’s bureaucratic abyss, yet every brushstroke summons a vengeful ghost: Anton Tiller’s naval officer, officially buried at sea, now rumored to be living under the crown of an Austro-Hungarian turncoat. Jenö Balassa’s archivist, a collector of condemned portraits, trades government seals for clandestine sketches, while Lucy Doraine’s morphine-addled countess stages decadent tableaux vivants in which Claire Lotto’s orphaned violinist must play until her cuticles split. Lajos Kemenes’s dockworker, a human map of shrapnel scars, smuggles canvases inside salted-cod crates; Iván Petrovich’s anarchist printer bleeds sepia ink across broadsides that denounce the very patrons who commission the lady’s portraits. Each night the woman daubs her own face with sunflower pollen, a pagan shield against the men who would fix her on their parlor walls like pinned butterflies. When a forged death certificate surfaces, the chase spirals from candlelit catacombs to a deranged carnival where Ivo Badalic’s strongman snaps iron chains as if they were stale breadsticks. The final reel combusts in a granary loft: the painter lashes a colossal self-portrait to the rafters, douses it in lamp oil, and strikes a match. As flames lick the wooden ribs of the building, the missing lover stumbles from the shadows—eyes cataract-gray, uniform in tatters—unable to decide whether to rescue the woman or the painting. The camera tilts upward: burning petals ascend into night fog, a perverse benediction over a city that no longer remembers which side of the border it occupies.
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