Summary
A Copenhagen winter, bruise-blue and gas-lit, watches financier Collin—once Midas in a top-hat—crumble after the coffin of his luminous first-born clicks shut. The remaining daughter, betrothed to a courteous diplomat, flutters like a candle against the patriarch’s eclipse; her laughter ricochets through marbled hallways already haunted by the child’s absent step. Collin, allergic to consolation, seeks a sharper absence: he courts the velvet oblivion of opium, first as a dandyish experiment, then as a nightly sacrament. Under the drug’s lugubrious wings, memories mutate—grief becomes a seductive siren, luring him through dockside dens where smoke coils like ancestral ghosts. Each reel tightens the noose: bank ledgers bleed red, engagement rings are pawned, and the once-spotless salons acquire the fungal patina of despair. When at last the banker, skeletal and wild-eyed, confronts the spectral image of the dead child on a rain-slick quay, the film withholds easy resurrection; instead it closes on a tableau of two sisters—one in the grave, one in the doorway—while Collin’s silhouette dissolves into Copenhagen’s charcoal dawn, a man literally exhaled by his own grief.
Synopsis
The rich banker Collin has lost one of his favorite daughters. He is unrestrained by grief. His other daughter is happily engaged and can not disperse the father's darkness. He drops deeper and deeper.
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