Summary
A tempestuous canvas of revolutionary Paris unfurls as two sisters—orphans adrift in a metropolis hemorrhaging reason—struggle to keep faith while guillotine shadows lengthen. Henriette, radiant yet resolute, combs the labyrinthine streets for her blind sibling Louise, whose sightlessness becomes a cruel metaphor for a populace groping through moral darkness. Aristocrats disguised as cadavers, Jacobins drunk on ideology, and a venomous beggar-queen who trades infants for coins all conspire to sever the siblings’ clasped hands. Along the way, a young viscount—his silks torn, his heart pierced by Henriette’s courage—attempts to ferry them across the blood-choked Seine toward a dawn that may never break. Griffith cross-cuts between opulent salons now reeking of gunpowder and cellar hideouts where lullabies compete with the rattle of tumbrels, orchestrating a visual symphony that laments not merely lost innocence but the very fracture of fraternity. When the sisters finally reunite on a scaffold that has already devoured their last hope, the director’s last-minute rescue feels less like melodramatic reprieve than a prayer that history itself might yet revise its ink of scarlet.
Synopsis
Two orphaned sisters are caught up in the turmoil of the French Revolution, encountering misery and love along the way.
Director
Cast
