Ambrose and the Bathing Girls

In a sun-dazzled seaside resort that feels half–fever dream, half–postcard, the portly patriarch Ambrose arrives armed only with a striped bathing costume and a libido that refuses to retire. While parasols twirl like baroque ballerinas and phonographs wheeze forgotten ragtime, he pursues a bevy of flirting nymphs whose pastel swimsuits cling like whipped cream to curves. Each girl is a living vignette: one spritzes lemonade into the air so the droplets become prismatic halos, another sketches naughty mermaids in the sand, a third balances a parasol on her pinky toe while reciting bawdy limericks. Ambrose, belly jiggling like a jellyfish in a storm, ricochets between them—now a sheepish satyr, now a tipsy Poseidon—until jealous beaus, bell-boys, and a monocled matron with a poodle the size of a turkey converge in a Keystone-tinged cyclone of misplaced kisses, flying deckchairs, and an exploding ice-cream cart. The finale dissolves into a dusk-orange horizon where Ambrose, half-submerged, waves a white flag made of bloomers while the girls sprint laughing into the surf, leaving only foam and the faint echo of a kazoo rendition of “By the Beautiful Sea.”