Summary
A wind-whipped Flemish mill, its sails scrawling slow arcs against pewter skies, is the first cradle of Anna’s kinetic grace; her childhood duet with Johannes, a barefoot shepherd boy whose reed-flute cadences match her spinning footsteps, seems choreographed by the village’s own breath. Death’s scythe reaps the miller, and Brussels swallows the orphaned girl whole: a theatre impresario, dazzled by her improvised jig on a trestle table, transmutes raw vitality into arabesques and entrechats, while Johannes, dragged back to pastoral servitude, nurses a constellated ache. Years distill into marquee lights, tulle, and roses flung at the feet of the now-crowned Anna; yet when the shepherd reappears—sunburnt, sheepskin still clinging to his shoulders—she turns away, intoxicated by loftier altitudes. An aeronaut with waxed moustache and a silken balloon tempts her skyward: cumulonimbus titans collide, silk shreds, basket plummets, and the prima ballerina awakens in a crater of mud, her retinas seared blank. Flight, fame, and sight evaporate; only the creak of the old mill welcomes her back, and there waits Johannes, love neither spoken nor extinguished, a silent cartographer of all the years she never saw.
Synopsis
In a small Dutch village, two children, Anna, the miller's daughter and Johannes, the shepherd are close friends. When Anna's father dies, her mother sends her to live with her aunt in Brussels. Theren the manager of a theatre who had seen her dancing at the village party, accepts to train her as a ballerina. Johannes tries to follow her but his mother forces to go back to the village. The years pass and Anna has become a famous ballerina. When Johannes comes to visit her, she refuses to see him. She falls in love with an aeronaut who takes her on his balloon for a flight. The balloon is caught in a storm and falls to the ground. Anna survives the crash but she had become blind. She returns to the village to live with her mother. There she finds Johannes who has never stopped loving her.
Review Excerpt
"
There are films you watch, and then there are films that watch you—Loyalty belongs to the latter caste. Shot on the cusp of 1927, this Belgian-Dutch co-production slipped through the cracks of canonical silence, yet its emotional sonar keeps pinging decades later. I unearthed a 35-mm nitrate print in a deconsecrated monastery outside Bruges; the projector’s carbon arc hissed like a serpent while Anna’s first plié quivered on the mildewed sheet. By the time the balloon’s rip-panel tore open, my ..."
