Survival

In this 1928 Weimar-era adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s Vautrin cycle, the notorious escaped convict Jacques Collin seeks the ultimate camouflage within the crimson-lit sanctuary of a metropolitan brothel. Far from the reach of the law, he assumes the mantle of a shadow-patriarch, adopting a young man and meticulously grooming him for high society—a vicarious redemption for a man who can never walk in the sun. The convict’s carefully constructed world of surrogate fatherhood and illicit safety is pushed to the brink when one of the house’s residents falls into a desperate, obsessive love with his now-grown protégé. As romantic jealousy threatens to peel back his layers of deception, the film transforms into a claustrophobic study of how the ghosts of a criminal past inevitably collide with the desires of the present.