Summary
Copenhagen’s gas-lamps flicker like half-remembered footlights across the cobblestones where Melitta von Windheim—barely nineteen, already burning with the incandescent hunger that only true theatrespawn possess—first spies Ludvig Romay: the actor who walks onstage and somehow makes the proscenium arch forget its own geometry. Through a cousin’s careless invitation she infiltrates the velvet-lined salon where Romay holds court, cigarette balanced between two fingers as though he were weighing the smoke itself. One heartbeat later, the room tilts; chandeliers become planets orbiting the gravitational pull of his voice. Rudolf, the cousin who has loved her since childhood, watches his own affection evaporate like stage-fog under hot limelight. Marriage follows with the swift inevitability of a third-act curtain drop, leaving Rudolf outside the marital mise-en-scène, clutching a ring that will never again fit any finger. What unfolds is not a love triangle but a love crucible: every glance between the newlyweds an alchemical test, every rehearsal hallway a corridor where jealousy echoes louder than any applause. When Romay finally kisses her against a backdrop of painted moonlight, the celluloid itself seems to blush; yet the closer they cling, the more the camera insists on pulling back, revealing footlights, fly-lofts, the greasy mechanics of illusion—as if to ask whether desire can survive once the greasepaint washes off.
Synopsis
19-year-old Melitta von Windheim is profoundly fascinated by the famous actor Ludvig Romay. That's why she can hardly believe her own good fortune, as it turns out that her cousin Rudolf is an old friend of Romay and wants to introduce them. Romay and Melitta hit it off straight away, and before poor Rudolf can look twice, the woman he's in love with is married off to someone else.
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