Summary
In the soot-laced twilight of a nameless Spanish port, Peladilla—an ageing coachman whose whip once cracked like a cathedral bell—hauls the last gleaming remnants of empire through cobblestone arteries. His carriage, lacquered in flaking vermilion, ferries not aristocrats but the ghosts of their decadence: a consumptive duchess clutching a moth-eaten mantilla, a defrocked priest hawking indulgences for cigarettes, a child contortionist whose spine bends like a question mark around tomorrow. Berta Romero’s camera clings to Peladilla’s calloused palms as if they were parchment atlases; every crease charts a voyage from royal stables to the gutter where his former mare now rots, her mane braided with seaweed. Benito Perojo’s script refuses linearity: scenes loop, stutter, reverse, mirroring the coachman’s syphilitic hallucinations. One night a storm of silver pesetas falls from the sky; by dawn the coins have rusted into bullet casings. Pedro Zorrilla’s monsignor offers absolution in exchange for a ride to the gallows, yet the gallows turn out to be the carriage itself, its axles tightened into a noose. When Peladilla finally cracks his whip, the sound is not leather on flesh but the universe’s spine snapping—time shatters into cigar smoke and the film ends with the coach rolling backward into the Atlantic, horses replaced by silhouettes of the disappeared.
