La forza della coscienza

A gaunt provincial lawyer, tormented by the cadaverous light of kerosene lamps, receives a letter sealed with black wax: his childhood friend, once presumed drowned in the Po, is alive, shackled to a chain-gang in the Appenine quarries. The film uncoils like a fevered confession—Ines Zacconi’s Maddalena, eyes brimming with lagoon-green guilt, has spent ten years laundering blood-money through candle-lit orphanages, convinced she murdered the man now grinding stone under a numbered placard. Ermete Zacconi’s Attorney Zanetti—stooped, quivering, a quill tucked behind a translucent ear—sets off across a landscape of frost-bitten vineyards and sulphurous foundries to purchase the condemned man’s freedom before the Feast of Saint Agatha, when all sentences are commuted or carried out. Each station of his pilgrimage reveals another stratum of complicity: a station-master who forged transit papers; a nun who catalogues sins like pressed butterflies; a one-eyed smuggler who once sold the escapee a false passport in exchange for a sonata on a cracked harmonium. Night scenes are painted in mercury and charcoal—the camera glides past charcoal burners whose faces glow like communion wafers, then lingers on Felice Minotti’s Prison Warden as he recites Dante to cholera-ridden inmates, his breath crystallising in the damp. When the lawyer finally confronts the prisoner—bent, half-blind, chipping marble that will become a triumphal arch for the king—he discovers the man has no memory of the alleged crime, only the scar of a woman’s bite on his shoulder like a map of the lagoon. In the climactic candlelit chapel, Maddalena confesses not to murder but to the greater sin of forgetting: she erased the victim from her mind to survive, and in doing so erased herself. The bells of agony ring; the condemned walks free; the lawyer remains behind, imprisoned by the knowledge that conscience is less a compass than a rusted mirror reflecting nothing but the beholder’s own fracture.