The Dazzling Miss Davison

Summary

A boulevardier’s idle gaze fractures into obsession when Gerard Buckland trails a sylph in serpentine silk through the gaslit grid of Manhattan; from a murmuring throng a seedy courier slips her a river of fire—an opulent diamond rivière—before she evaporates like steam off asphalt. Hours later, amid the burnished mahogany of a Gramercy salon, the same apparition drifts into the parlor, now gowned in innocence, calling herself merely ‘Miss Davison.’ She spins a yarn of jocular pick-pocketry, insisting she lifts pearls and brooches from her circle only to restore them over tea, a social parlor trick. Gerard, nostrils flaring with fox-suspicion, detects the ozone of deception but misreads its vector: he braces for a femme kleptomaniac, not the clandestine crusader she actually is. Beneath the velvet glove lies a woman laundering blood-drenched gems for a clandestine tribunal of society dowagers who once wore them while financing atrocities in the Congo; the necklace is evidence, the ‘pick-pocket’ tale a honey-cloud to distract male egos. Every glittering stone she reclaims is another indictment against Empire, another stanza in a silent epic of restitution. The film pirouettes on a mise-en-abyme: each time Gerard lunges for the key to her motives, the lock changes shape, until the final reel detonates the very notion of possession—love included.

Synopsis

Young society rake Gerard Buckland spies a pretty girl walking down the street. As he tries to figure out a way to approach her, he sees a disreputable-looking man surreptitiously hand her a diamond necklace, which she hides on her person before fading into the crowd and disappearing from sight. Later that day he visits a friend's home, and is astounded to meet that same girl. During their conversation she claims that, as a lark, she picks her friends' pockets of valuables and gives them back later--but Gerard doesn't quite buy it. It turns out that she is, in fact, not what she says she is, but not in the way Gerard thinks.