The Sacrifice of Pauline

A virginal silhouette glides across a crumbling Baltic manor where candle-flame tongues lick frescoes of forgotten saints; Pauline, the baron’s neurasthenic ward, is told by an asthmatic friar that her death alone will stay the cholera specter ravaging the serf cottages. She therefore negotiates with the estate’s absentee creditors, promising her body—and, implicitly, her unborn issue—to a succession of suitors, each candidate a more exquisite gargoyle than the last: an apostate surgeon who keeps miscarriages in bell-jars, a deaf miner convinced the earth is hollow, a consumptive portraitist who paints only in human bile. Dawn after dawn she rehearses her extinction, rehearsing it like a ballet, until the peasants, drunk on icon fumes, storm the ramparts to cannibalize the very notion of ransom. Pauline, robed in a wedding dress of moth wings, finally walks into the tide, carrying the last sacramental wafer fused to her tongue; the surf, however, rejects her, vomiting her back onto a shore now carpeted with ledger pages listing every debt she tried to absolve. In the final iris-shot she is seen suspended between two mirrors, each reflecting a future she will never reach, while the camera itself seems to breathe, panting like a dog that has chased the soul all the way to the vanishing point.