Summary
Against a charcoal dusk that smells of sawdust and cheap champagne, a harlequin—his grin painted wider than the proscenium arch—discovers that the most savage pratfall is love itself. While his painted smile sells out Copenhagen’s Winter Hall, his wife’s heart defects to a monocled count whose laughter is as hollow as a cracked bell. What follows is not mere abandonment but a slow-motion carnival of humiliation: greasepaint tears mingle with confetti as the clown, once monarch of the ring, becomes the sideshow’s ghost, a white-faced Orpheus descending into gin-soaked alleys where gaslamps hiss like hecklers. The film’s flicker—nitrate heartbeats stuttering through 1917 projectors—turns each frame into a cracked mirror; every pratfall echoes off the proscenium like a gunshot in a cathedral. In the final reel, the clown re-enters the ring, eyes rimmed with kohl and grief, and performs a pantomime so lethal in its pathos that even the trapeze artists forget to breathe. No redemption arrives—only the brutal elegance of a man who has learned that the most truthful mask is the one that cannot be removed.
A successful clown is abandoned by his wife for a count.
