Summary
In the bruised twilight of 1920s France, Suzanne—part flapper, part fury—refuses to let the Baron de Hofland’s gilded talons pluck her lover Max from her orbit. Hofland, a cosmopolitan spider whose fortune is stitched from colonial rubber and blood, spirits Max through a shifting archipelago of shuttered villas: Normandy slate, Riviera stucco, Pyrenean stone. Each estate becomes a sepulcher echoing with Max’s muffled cries and the baron’s predatory appetites. Suzanne, corseted but unbowed, embarks on a peripatetic crusade across a fractured nation—train whistles in the night, fog-choked riverbanks, vineyards bruised purple under moonlight. Her unlikely retinue: a chambermaid whose encyclopedic memory of servant corridors turns every kitchen door into a clandestine portal, and a wiry tramp whose flute solos barter passage on boxcars. Together they decode railway ledgers, bribe postmasters, and unpick the baron’s cartography of obsession. The film’s geography is a palimpsest: every château corridor overwritten with Suzanne’s footprints, every salon chandelier refracting her resolve. When she finally confronts Hofland in a candlelit Loire turret, the showdown is less rescue than resurrection—Max emaciated but unbroken, the baron’s mask of civility cracking to reveal the colonial rot beneath. Their escape is not a chase but a metamorphosis: the lovers vanish into the crowd at dawn, swallowed by a republic still reeling from war, their silhouettes dissolving like celluloid burns into the promise of a nation learning to breathe again.
Synopsis
Max, Suzanne's boyfriend, has been kidnapped by baron de Hofland, a rich foreigner who covets Suzanne. Hofland has locked up Max in one of the many villas he owns and uses as hideouts. But Suzanne is not intimidated. She goes in search of her beloved throughout France, aided by her chambermaid and a friendly young tramp.
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