La morte che assolve

A marble-faced usurer, Falco, crucifies his wife Maddalena on the public pillory of gossip, then erases her from hearth and name; across the same corridor of time, the daughter Erica—sold like a ledger entry to a trans-Atlantic matron—grows into a porcelain rebellion. Elettra Raggio incarnates both bruised Madonna and tempestuous heir, letting maternal ashes cling to the daughter’s ankles like unresolved guilt. The film folds Rome’s gaslit alleys into Ellis-Island fog, stitching two continents with a single thread of blood-money. Francesco Serravalle’s scenario detonates the bourgeois melodrama from within: every close-up is an autopsy, every iris-out a gasp for absolution that never arrives.