The Woman of Mystery

Francis Ford’s celluloid fever-dream catapults us into a twilight Europe where biplane ribs rattle like sabres above canals the colour of oxidised absinthe. Grace Cunard—goggled, trench-coated, eyes twin magnesium flares—pilots her kite through artillery cumulus, hunting a ghost U-boat whose conning-tower insignia is a blood-red hourglass. Below, the enemy have grafted a locomotive to their iron fish; steam and periscope rise together, a mechanical hermaphrodite that scythes through marsh mist toward the neutral principality of Valdak, seat of a weaponised sapphire said to freeze time. Cunard, alias ‘Madame X,’ infiltrates the submarine-train’s velvet saloons, her gloved fingers decoding Morse from the chandelier’s trembling lustres. Ford, her former lover turned enemy ace, pursues in a scarlet monoplane, unaware the woman he believes a traitor is racing to sabotage the gem before it annihilates memory itself. Between aerial dogfights staged amid St-Elmo’s fire and underwater cabaret scenes lit by phosphorescent jellyfish, the lovers duel across collapsing timelines, their only constant a cigarette case engraved with tomorrow’s date. When the locomotive finally dives beneath the Adriatic, carriages flood in slow waltz time; Cunard, lungs blooming with salt, rips the sapphire from Ford’s breast pocket and crushes it—history exhales, the war ends, the lovers are left stranded on a beach of broken pocket-watches, kissing as the sky forgets what year it is.