Summary
In a Moravian village where the air itself seems to shimmer with ancestral embers, a widowed miller haunted by the scent of linden smoke watches his daughter—taciturn, moon-cheeked—ignite a triad of masculine obsessions: the sexton’s son who carves psalms into pine, the itinerant Jewish peddler clutching a viola like a prayer shawl, and the local squire whose moustache drips with baroque entitlement. Over four seasons shot through with ochre dusk and pewter dawn, the girl’s every footstep scatters sparks that smoulder in haylofts, confessionals, and the rust-flecked turbine of the mill wheel. When the river swells with spring melt, a half-remembered folk song about burning swans becomes a funeral hymn for drowned virtue; the miller, convinced that flame is the only truthful language left, torches his own livelihood, turning the family’s saga into a cathedral of cinders where ghosts rehearse unspoken vows. The final tableau—a slow pan across charred beams that resemble a crucifix—leaves the spectator holding hot ash in the mouth, tasting love as both sacrament and arson.
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