Summary
Seven nooses dangle like black commas against a white prison wall, each a full-stop for a life still stubbornly breathing. In the gloom of a Tsarist lock-up, a poet-turned-revolutionary, a thief who steals only from the rich, a soldier who once bayoneted his own mirrored reflection, a fallen aristocrat clutching a moth-eaten doll, a syphilitic actor reciting forgotten lines to rats, a priest who has misplaced his god, and a peasant girl who tried to burn the sky wait for the dawn that will haul them into the afterlife’s antechamber. Their stories leak out in chiaroscuro flashbacks: a snowy duel where blood looks like poppies on linen, a ballroom lit by kerosene chandeliers where dancers waltz through broken glass, a child’s swing that becomes a gallows in miniature. Between the iron bars, time liquefies; yesterday’s laughter drips into tomorrow’s scaffold. When the hangman finally arrives—his face masked by the same burlap used to sack grain—he carries only six ropes; the seventh convict, chosen by lottery, must watch the others drop, then walk back to a cell now echoing like a hollow violin. The film ends on a freeze-frame of the survivor’s iris, dilated so wide it swallows the entire screen, leaving the audience to drown in that black circle where guilt and grace dissolve into the same ink.
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