Summary
In the gas-lit labyrinth of Weimar Berlin, a maenad in silk gloves named Sappho glides through smoke-veiled salons, her laughter a siren’s hook that hauls men toward the abyss; Andreas, already half-mad with poetry, is lured, devoured, discarded—his mind left a cracked mirror. Richard, the rational elder, arrives to reclaim the shards, but the city’s nocturnal carnival swallows intention: Teddy, a flaneur with a monocle for irony, escorts him to the Odeon where Sappho presides like a pagan priestess over a congregation of trembling satyrs. Richard, ignorant of her identity, feels the room tilt when her kohl-ringed gaze lands on him; she smells of narcissus and danger, and in that instant the film’s central irony locks into place—the hunter believes he is rescuing prey while the prey, sleek and self-possessed, begins to circle. What follows is less a seduction than a slow dismemberment of certainties: letters vanish, loyalties invert, a brother’s laughter echoes from the asylum’s stone throat. Sappho, half-demon, half-muse, stages private tragedies in candle-scorched boudoirs, her body a shifting text Richard tries to annotate with reason; each annotation becomes a scar. When the final mask drops, the revelation is not that evil wore a beautiful face, but that beauty itself is a contagion against which fraternal love, psychiatric science, and bourgeois honor are tissue paper. The curtain falls on a tableau worthy of Georges Rodenbach: Richard alone beneath a streetlamp, snow settling like ash on his coat, Andreas’s laughter still ricocheting inside his skull, Sappho’s carriage disappearing into the arterial dark—three souls condemned to orbit the black star of desire.
Synopsis
Richard De La Croix has a brother, Andreas, who has been driven insane by a notorious vamp and socialite named Sappho. A man-about-town named Teddy takes Richard to the Odeon to meet her, but when Sappho actually meets Richard, he is unaware that she is the woman who drove Andreas insane.
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