Summary
In a sun-splashed kingdom where topiary mazes coil like sleeping serpents, a nameless princess slips from marble corridors into the perfume of wild gardens, swapping coronet for canvas cap, hungering to taste the world without the metallic aftertaste of protocol. She collides—quite literally, spilling sketchbooks and secrets—with Jack Chalmers, a pauper-poet whose tongue is as quick as his purse is thin, a young man convinced that love is either a carnival fakir’s trick or the last honest religion left. Coo-ee Knight floats through the same grounds as the royal children’s tutor, a widow whose mourning clothes can’t mask the ember-bright curiosity in her gaze; she keeps her late husband’s unanswered letters in a lacquered box, reading them aloud to roses at dusk. Between masquerade banquets, clandestine astronomy lessons on the palace roof, and a single blood-orange afternoon beside a carp pond, the princess and the poet weave an improbable covenant: she will fund his pamphlets vilifying the monarchy if he promises to never name her, to never anchor her to the gilded target of her birthright. Yet each stolen kiss redraws the map of their loyalties—his verses grow gentler, her disguises grow heavier. When the Queen’s spymaster intercepts a sonnet with a tell-tale watermark, the lovers are flung into a night journey across salt flats and firefly vineyards, pursued by lamplight and legend. At a crumbling convent they meet Knight’s tutor, who bargains with relics and riddles, trading her widow’s weeds for a pilgrim’s staff, guiding the fugitives toward a ruined amphitheater where citizens gather to testify against crowns. There, under fractured constellations, the princess must decide whether love’s triumph lies in abdication or in storming her own throne, while the poet confronts the terror that every word he’s written has merely been another ornate cage for the woman he adores. Their final wager: sunrise. If by dawn the gathered crowd still recognizes her as heir, she will return to court and marry the neighboring prince, cementing an alliance that will flood the borders with gold but drown the orchards in silence. If, however, she can step into the light unclaimed by title or rumor, the kingdom must rethink its myths. The film closes on an image both ecstatic and cruel—three silhouettes racing the horizon, laughter echoing like coins flung into a fountain, leaving the audience to decide whether the hoofbeats fading in the distance signal escape or return, whether love triumphs by breaking the world or by breaking the heart so thoroughly that the fracture becomes a new country.
Synopsis
