Summary
An orphaned Sicilian shepherd boy, barely past the tremor of first communion, is sold by his uncle to a Neapolitan street-gang that trafficks in child beggars; the transaction occurs beneath the sulphur gaze of Vesuvius, whose plume becomes the film’s brooding chorus. Joseph—played with feral minimalism by Attilio De Virgiliis—escapes across a Pontine marsh at dawn, his bare feet slapping the mirror-flat water until blood blossoms like poppies. He stows away on a freighter bound for Marseilles, locked inside a grand piano that breathes salt; the instrument is later hoisted onto a quay where a consumptive dockworker pounds out a single, broken chord that will echo through every subsequent frame. In the Provençal twilight the boy is adopted by a sect of Jansenist monks who teach him to illuminate manuscripts with lapis and powdered gold, yet the abbey’s scriptorium is a labyrinth of candle-shadows where guilt incubates. Years collapse; the adolescent Joseph, now possessed of a gaze both hieratic and wounded, is dispatched to Paris to restore a reputedly cursed triptych in a derelict Marais chapel. The panels depict the binding of Isaac, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt—subjects that leak into the film’s bloodstream. While scraping away centuries of candle soot he uncovers a hidden parchment: a map of the Paris catacombs annotated with alchemical symbols and a single name—his own—inked in infant’s blood. The discovery ignites a fever-dream investigation that drags him through opium dens in the 9th arrondissement, zinc bars where absinthe drips like liquid emerald, and a clandestine salon inside a deconsecrated church where a demimondaine (Ettore Mazzanti in gender-bending silk) stages tableaux vivants of martyrdoms. Each encounter peels another lamella of identity until Joseph confronts the possibility that the gang he fled still operates as a secret guild of art forgers who counterfeit souls. The final movement spirals underground: the monks, it transpires, are custodians of a subterranean reliquary where every child they “saved” has been taxidermied into a living icon, eyes replaced by topaz to refrlect candlelight eternally. Joseph must decide whether to burn the archive—thereby annihilating the only proof he ever existed—or to assume his predestined role as the final relic. The film ends on a freeze-frame of his trembling hand poised above a match, the flame mirrored in the glass eyes of a hundred suspended boys, while overhead the bells of Notre-Dame toll for a feast day that will never arrive.
Review Excerpt
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A canvas of lava and lambskin
There are films that narrate; Joseph incises. From the first vulcanian blush over the Tyrrhenian shoreline, cinematographer Fabbris treats light like corrosive acid—colors don’t merely tint the frame, they eat it. The ochre dust of rural Sicily becomes a proto-cinema of poverty, grains swirling across the lens until the very act of seeing feels abrasive. When the camera tilts up toward the child’s face, the Vesuvian plume is perfectly centered like a wound in the ..."
