Summary
A soot-smudged caravan creaks across the silver of the French countryside, its wheels whispering of patrin codes and blood-oaths. Inside sits Miarka, granddaughter of the indomitable Romany Kate, her hair a raven comet against the dusk. Kate, a living grimoire of tattoos and tobacco, has decreed that the girl must wed the lost gypsy king whose name drifts like smoke between tribes. Their only courtier is a shaggy European brown bear, collar scarred, eyes liquid with prehistoric melancholy. They camp on the magnanimous whim of a rheumy aristocrat who keeps them near because his library houses a brittle parchment—inky runes no gadjo scholar can crack. Beneath topiary shadows, the estate’s lovelorn gardener watches Miarka with the hunger of a man who envies fruit for being bitten. One equinox night he pillages the manor’s strongbox, torches the west wing, and leaves a trail of silver coins that point accusingly at Kate. The gendarmes clap irons on the matriarch; the bear roars in useless protest. Weeks later the bruin finds the arsonist alone among laurels, mauls him until confession gurgles out with the blood. Dying, the gardener names himself the culprit; Kate is freed yet exiled by her own pride. Sensing Miarka’s pulse quicken for Ivor—the gentleman’s supposed nephew—Kate whisks her away into a labyrinth of hawthorn and starlight. On his sickbed the old patron unseals a darker truth: Ivor was a foundling left at the iron gates, swaddled in a crimson shawl. Kate, deciphering the parchment by moon and fire, learns the cipher’s secret: Ivor is the long-scattered chief, the promised bridegroom etched in prophecy since Miarka’s birth. Destiny completes its circle not with thunder but with the soft click of a locket closing.
Synopsis
Miarka, the granddaughter of Romany Kate, according to her grandmother, is to marry a gypsy chief-whereabouts unknown. Romany Kate, Miarka and her tame bear, live upon the estate of an old gentleman who tolerates Kate because of his interest in gypsies, and more particularly because he has a gypsy document which he cannot decipher. A gardener, in love with Miarka, robs the master and sets fire to the home, making it appear that Kate is the guilty one. She is convicted but later Miarka's pet bear kills the gardener and he confesses his crime before he dies. Kate, realizing Miarka is in love with the master's nephew, Ivor, takes her away. Later the master tells Ivor that he is not his nephew but was found at the gate when a babe. The document is deciphered by Kate and it discloses that Ivor is the chief whom Miarka had been destined to marry.
Review Excerpt
"
There is a moment, roughly halfway through Jean Richepin’s celluloid fever-dream Miarka, the Child of the Bear, when the camera forgets its obligation to plot and simply stares at a girl’s face refracted in river water. Miarka (Marie Montbazon) kneels, cupping the current; moonlight perforates the plane of the stream, fracturing her reflection into silver shards. It is 1920, years before Cocteau will make mirrors liquid, yet here is already the same ache—cinema enraptured by its own fragility. ..."
