Summary
A Viennese operetta star—radiant, adored—awakens to find her husband’s corpse sprawled across the silk eiderdown, blood soaking the embroidered herons like crimson ink on rice paper. The shutter clicks; the police arrive; flash-bulbs detonate. Overnight the spotlight that once crowned her becomes a garrote. While detectives sift through bouquets and threatening letters, the actress flees into the gas-lit labyrinth of post-war Europe, clutching a single clue: an emerald earring that once belonged to a rival grand-duchess. Each train station, each dressing-room mirror, each moonlit balcony tightens the noose of accusation. In Budapest she trades her sable for a chimneysweep’s soot; in Trieste she sings for pennies beside anarchist pamphleteers; in Constantinople she barters a Caruso record for passage on a smuggler’s skiff. Pursued by a relentless inspector whose moustache twitches like a metronome of doom, she descends into a fever-dream of masks: cabaret chanteuse, plague-nurse, Ottoman odalisque. Only on the fog-slick ramparts of a Danube fortress does she confront the puppet-master—a childhood friend turned morphine-addled medium—who staged the murder to harvest her soul for a snuff-film empire. The final reel dissolves into a negative image: the diva exonerated yet hollow-eyed, applauded by a crowd that will forget her before the echo dies, while the camera cranes up to reveal the earring glinting in the fist of a street urchin who will sell it for bread at dawn.
Synopsis
Based on Maurice Level's novel "L, Angoisse".
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