Marga, Lebensbild aus Künstlerkreisen

A fin-de-siècle Vienna that never quite existed is painted in phosphorescent grays and bruised mauves: Marga Fugger—demi-mondaine, demiurge, full-time muse—drifts through cafés where Klimt gossip meets Mahler’s dying chords, her cigarette the only steady lantern in a gaslight dusk. She trades a banker’s love for a poet’s syphilitic kiss, poses for an unfinished canvas that devours its painter, then sells the scandal to tabloids to fund a dancer’s tuberculosis cure. Between absinthe laced with ether and waltzes that spin like cracked gramophones, she births a child she will never claim, buries a husband who was never hers, and finally walks into the Prater fair’s Tunnel of Love—only to vanish among mirrored corridors that return no reflection. The film ends on a freeze-frame of her empty glove on the carousel floor, the organ grinding a lullaby for a life that refused to be owned, archived, or forgiven.