Summary
Bobby Flip—hollow-eyed, half-mythic Berlin street mongrel turned accidental matinée idol—stumbles from the courtyards of Neukölln into the blinding carbide of a UFA soundstage, where the apparatus of cinema chews up his raw charisma and regurgitates a commodity labelled “Bobby.” Between takes he rehearses his own life: a mother who sold her wedding ring for schnapps, a father vanished into the Great War’s fog, a sister whose laugh ricocheted too close to the tracks of an oncoming train. Each reel becomes a palimpsest—footage of a boy running across the Lustgarten at dusk is spliced into a spy thriller; the scar under his left clavicle, earned during a dockyard brawl, is re-interpreted by the publicity department as a sabre wound received while defending a countess’s honour. Directors rewrite his biography faster than he can live it, until memory and myth converge in a final, hallucinated sequence: Bobby watches himself watching himself on screen, the celluloid burning, the projector’s beam turning into the headlight of another train, the one he has fled since childhood. The closing shot—his silhouette dissolving inside the white rectangle—leaves only the whir of the shutter and the acrid perfume of nitrate in flames.
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