Summary
Feuillade’s Parisette unspools like a moth-eaten tapestry of fin-de-siècle Lisbon, where azulejos sweat holy smoke and alley cats recite psalms. A Portuguese nobleman—his lineage as cracked as the tiles beneath his boots—returns from exile clutching a daguerreotype of a woman he once loved, only to find her cloistered behind Carmel’s grille, her eyes two extinguished candles. Into this triptych slips a street urchin who mirrors the aristocrat down to the crescent scar on his cheek; the boy filches vestments, trades them for sardines, then vanishes inside the convent’s chimney like a soot-black angel. Between vespers and vendettas, the film folds time upon itself: confessionals become puppet theaters, processions mutate into funerals, and every bell toll turns blood to ink. When the nun finally unveils her face to the nobleman, it is the urchin who stares back—gender, class, soul all swapped like carnival masks—leaving only the echo of a shutter that never quite closes.
Synopsis
A cine-roman following the fates of a Portuguese nobleman, a Carmelite nun, and a mysterious lookalike.
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