My Mistake

In a tenement flat that smells of boiled cabbage and unpaid rent, a threadbare husband—equal parts Chaplinesque tramp and hen-pecked Everyman—stumbles through a city that seems to have conspired in his humiliation. First, a broken shoelace catapults him into a horse trough; later, a blindfolded errand boy swings a ladder like a scythe, clipping the poor fellow’s eyebrow on the arc. Each pratfall is a brushstroke in an urban fresco of indignity, culminating in a bruise whose violet bloom will have to be explained to a spouse whose temper is already a lit fuse. The film’s single reel becomes a miniature morality play: every sidewalk crack, every dangling shop sign, every flirtatious gust of wind conspires to tattoo him with the evidence of his own insolvency. By the time he limps home, the black-eye is less a wound than a confession—an ink-blot in which his wife will read infidelity, idleness, and every unvoiced failure of their marriage. The curtain falls on a duet of slammed doors and crockery, the camera lingering on the cracked hallway mirror that now holds two fractured reflections: his, hers, and the invisible debt collector knocking downstairs.