Summary
In a gilded drawing-room where chiaroscuro flirts with candle-flame, a painter of tempestuous renown—his palette still reeking of turpentine and turmoiled hearts—trades his velvet smock for a footman’s livery, slipping incognito through the marbled corridors of a Riviera estate. The ruse is simple: dodge the matrimonial snares of a Russian heiress whose laughter crackles like burning silk, then vanish into the cobalt dusk. Yet the masquerade metastasizes; the artist, now answering to the borrowed name of ‘René’, finds himself polishing silver for dowagers who dissect his cheekbones over tea, while his clandestine canvases—ferocious, fauvist, alive with vermilion women who stare as though they might step out and accuse—are smuggled to a Montmartre dealer who pays in crumpled francs. Enter a second woman: a watchmaker’s daughter with soot-smudged lashes and a laugh that ricochets like a bullet in a cathedral. Their courthouse marriage is a hush-hush affair beneath a skylight pigeoned with Parisian rain; he signs the registry with the same hand that, hours later, will forge a duchess’s beauty into immortal pigment. From here the plot coils tighter: nocturnal attic sessions where candle-grease pools like blood, blackmail letters scented with tuberose, a gambling debt that demands a portrait of the very heiress he once fled. The film’s pulse quickens each time the valet’s waistcoat brushes against a secret easel; every brushstroke risks discovery, every kiss exchanged with his bride is tainted by the turpentine he cannot scrub from his cuticles. When the canvas intended to save them is unveiled at a salon, the heiress recognizes the wrist’s kinetic flourish—her own shoulder blade rendered in slash of ultramarine—and the chandeliered room erupts in whispers sharp enough to shred reputations. The final reel hurtles through midnight streets, a pawn-ticket flapping like a wounded gull, and a last-minute auction where love itself is bid upon by sneering dilettantes. In the ultimate irony, the artist must repudiate his own signature to reclaim it, scrawling ‘Copy’ across a masterpiece so that the original may remain untainted, a ghost no court can seize. Smoke clears; marriage survives, but only on the condition that genius remain forever masked, a fugitive even in its own home.
Synopsis
An artist pretends to be a valet to escape a woman's advances. He marries another woman but must keep painting in secret to make enough money.
Director
