La principessa Giorgio
Summary
A tremulous Lombard moon hangs above Lake Como, silvering the facades of a crumbling villa where Princess Giorgio—once the toast of European courts—now prowls corridors wallpapered with moth-eaten tapestries of her own legend. Giovanni Schettini’s camera stalks her like a guilty memory: every pan is a gasp, every iris-in a swallowed confession. Gemma De Sanctis embodies the fallen aristocrat with the brittle majesty of a cracked Sèvres vase; she glides through ballrooms lit only by chandeliers of gossip, her laughter a brittle firework that singes the ears of Beppo Corradi’s penniless count, who courts her for the last pearls still clinging to her throat. Around them, a serpentine retinue—Nicola Pescatori’s smirking secretary, Alberto Albertini’s bishop with velvet gloves concealing fiscal claws, Luigi Cigoli’s physician peddling morphine as if it were mercy—treat the princess’s ruin like a blood-sport tableau vivant. The plot, spider-thin yet barbed, follows Giorgio’s attempt to auction her remaining nights to the highest bidder while secretly bargaining for the return of her illegitimate son, hidden away years earlier to keep the bloodline “unblemished.” When a storm-drenched masquerade collapses into a maelstrom of forged IOUs and poisoned ices, the film detonates its own melodrama: silhouettes knife across wet marble, a gondola drifts empty toward Switzerland, and the final close-up traps De Sanctis behind ornate window-grille, her face dissolving into the lake’s black mirror—an image so exquisite it feels like watching a Rococo painting commit suicide.
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