Summary
In a town that seems stitched together from dusk and rust, an aging banker—pillar of the parish, keeper of ledgers—hoards not only coin but the brittle pride of a name unsmudged. His only heir, a son fluent in piano keys and Parisian absinthe, returns from continental exile, pockets empty, veins buzzing with vanity. A loan is whispered for; the patriarch’s refusal is silent yet seismic. That night the old man’s safe yawns open, securities vanish like startled ravens, and the son’s monogrammed handkerchief flutters beside the iron door. What follows is no courtroom procedural but a slow acid drip of suspicion: parishioners cross themselves when the family crest passes, the matriarch’s lace collar quivers like a trapped moth, and the boy’s betrothed—an orphan whose dowry once glimmered in those stolen bonds—now tastes ashes in every kiss. Directors Wolf and Pollock fracture chronology so that each flashback arrives like a cracked mirror: the son’s Parisian decadence is tinted arsenic-green; the father’s youthful humiliation at the hands of a robber-baron glows sulfurous amber. When the actual thief—a clerk with tuberculosis and a poet’s pallor—confesses on the marble steps of the cathedral, the town already smells the sulfur of a different sin: the readiness of fathers to believe the worst of their blood. The final shot frames the paternal mansion at dawn, shutters closed like a cataract eye, while the son, exonerated yet exiled, boards a train whose whistle echoes the old man’s last breath: a sound both pardon and dirge.
