Summary
A country estate crackles with static electricity when Miska, a swaggering herdsman whose muscles remember every cowhide they’ve ever caressed, is mistaken for the long-lost heir to the Mágnás fortune. Servants bow to his sunburnt neck; chandeliers refract his sheepish grin into a thousand fractured coronas. Meanwhile, Count Sándor—skeletal, perfumed, addicted to morphine and waltzes—plots to marry off his neurasthenic niece Klára to the phantom magnate so that debts evaporate like morning dew. Klára, all porcelain wrists and subversive smirks, smells the hoax yet feels the tug of Miska’s leather-and-hay scent; she begins to imagine a ballroom where calluses outrank crests. The real heir, a trembling clerk in Vienna whose only rebellion is buttering bread counterclockwise, arrives too late: Miska has already choreographed a revolution of cha-chaing maids, drunken archivists, and a goose that pecks the family tree to splinters. Deeds burn, violins weep, and the camera pirouettes through candle smoke as identity itself becomes a masquerade ball where every mask is stitched from someone else’s skin.
