Das Frauenhaus von Brescia

A Tyrolean inferno masquerading as a fortress: Brescia’s commandeered nunnery, rechristened the House of Pillory, becomes a carnivalesque cage where the spoils of war are not gold or land but the trembling flesh of enemy women. Through its lattice windows moonlight drips like hot wax on the shaved heads of Bavarian countesses, Serbian schoolteachers, Tyrolean violinists—each branded by rumor, each hurled into a vaulted dormitory where straw pallets reek of wet wool and yesterday’s blood. Outside, the victorious town—half-drunk on victory, half-starved by siege—pays a pfennig to gawk, grope, or hurl rotting squash at the captives. Inside, a micro-civilization curdles: bartered bread crusts become currency, a cracked teacup is a crown, and the youngest prisoner, barely fifteen, learns to paint her lips with brick dust before the mayor’s nocturnal inspections. The film stalks this perverse ecosystem with a taxidermist’s patience, lingering on the way candle soot collects on the clavicles of Frau Welcker’s aristocratic widow, or how the camera itself seems to flinch when a Prussian officer—half in love with his own cruelty—forces the women to rehearse a minuet for the amusement of riflemen who would rather rape than dance. Hubert Moest’s screenplay, adapted from Karl Hans Strobl’s scandalous novella, refuses the salacious wink of contemporaries like The Intrusion of Isabel; instead it stitches every leer to a scar, every giggle to a gasp, until the viewer cannot savor the spectacle without tasting rust on the tongue. When plague slithers in through the sewers, the town fathers bolt the gates from without, turning the prison into a quarantine pyre; what follows is not redemption but revelation—the women, no longer mere victims, forge a matriarchal tribunal, sentencing their former tormentors in absentia and, in the film’s most transgressive tableau, baptizing themselves with ink made from crushed bedbugs, rewriting their own heraldry on the stone. The final shot—an iris-in on a single unclaimed wooden clog bobbing in the fetid courtyard well—feels like a door slamming on the 19th century itself.