Summary
In a fog-choked European back-lot circa 1914, an unholy trinity of counterfeiters—swaggering Jack de Angelis, violin-string-taut John Williams, and marble-skinned Maria Jacobini—etch false emperors into copper plates with the devotional intensity of monks illuminating heretical bibles. Their forged banknotes slip through Vienna’s sewers, leap across Alpine passes, and flutter into the silk-lined pockets of generals who swap nations like playing cards. Romolo Giannetti’s undercover policeman, face a porcelain mask of guilt, infiltrates the cell by feigning a hunger for the same lucre, only to discover that the plates themselves are haunted: every impression births a doppelgänger of the engraver’s soul, condemning him to watch his own crimes circulate in perpetuity. When Jacobini’s character—half-maiden, half-molotov—falls for the detective, she trades her blood-spattered smock for a wedding dress stitched with magnesium threads; sparks from the police photographer’s flash pan ignite her veil, turning the clandestine print-shop into a cathedral of fire. The final reel is a stroboscopic danse macabre: presses hammering like war drums, banknotes whirling like moths around a kerosene lamp, the camera itself seeming to forge and re-forge reality until celluloid becomes currency and currency becomes confession. No moral epilogue arrives—only the lingering metallic taste of ink on the tongue and the suspicion that every spectator has unwittingly pocketed a counterfeit memory.
