Summary
A gilded Parisienne, Cleo de Bromsart—her ennui as heavy as the crystal chandeliers refracting in her family’s ballroom—accepts a moonlit whim from Prince Selm and drifts aboard his lacquered yacht toward a horizon that promises nothing but distraction. The sea, however, scripts its own libretto: a typhoon snaps the masts like matchsticks, spilling aristocrats into the ink-black foam. Three survivors wash onto a necklace of pale sand ringed by mangrove and mirage—Cleo in silk tatters, and two briny sailors whose eyes already appraise her as spoils. Days erode into hallucination: one tar vanishes thigh-first into a carnivorous sandbank, gurgling Baudelaire’s flowers of evil; the second lunges for Cleo’s body and receives, instead, her mother-of-pearl hairpin through the carotid. Weeks later, Jack Raft—half-poacher, half-philosopher—stumbles from the surf, skin lacquered in salt, carrying inside him a gentleness that startles even the gulls. He coaxes the fevered Cleo back from the lip of death with rainwater in a limpet shell and stories of a world where women own their own passports. When a cutter crewed by Chinese seal-smugglers beaches for fresh water, Jack cracks skulls with a driftwood boom, commandeers their schooner, and sets a course for Marseilles. Paris welcomes Cleo with velvet arms and the same marble fiancé whose kisses once tasted of securities and stock options. Between mahogany parlors and the gaslit Seine, she weighs a life stitched by parental ambition against the scarred mariner who taught her that survival can be a form of sovereignty. In the final reel she walks away from both suitors, the camera holding on her ungloved hand slipping a diamond ring into a beggar’s cup—an act neither punitive nor redemptive, merely the first spontaneous gesture of her adult life.
Synopsis
Parisian society girl Cleo de Bromsart is bored with her life and accepts an invitation from Prince Selm to join his yachting party. The cruise ends in disaster, and Cleo is stranded on a desert island with two sailors. One drowns in quicksand, and Cleo kills the other when he tries to rape her. Several weeks later, a derelict named Jack Raft is washed ashore and nurses the ailing woman back to health. Jack then effects their rescue by overpowering a gang of Chinese seal poachers. Upon her return to Paris, France, Cleo must choose between her fiancé, whom her parents approve, and Jack, whom she has grown to respect, and decides not to marry either.
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