La Paloma

Wherever Viola Schlump (stage name La Paloma) performs, the audience includes Count Isidor Palewski, a corpulent young man who has followed her from one second-rate nightclub to another for years, despite her failure to show much interest in him. She finally consents to become his mistress when she is diagnosed as being in the advanced stages of consumption. Isidor takes her to Europe’s luxury sanatoriums, where she stages an unexpected recovery and starts to fall in love, not with Isidor but with his love for her, and agrees to marry him. When her belief in his love starts to falter, Viola falls ill again and sets out to revenge herself. About this heady exercise in excess –that mixes the operatic passion of La Traviata, the stylish decadence of Stroheim and Sternberg, and the macabre glee of Grand Guignol–, it has been said that “Daniel Schmid fashions this tale into a poem, a play of associations around the (romantic) themes of love, death and the tomb. He is fascinated and tormented by the artistic desire to examine the creatures of the night, the stuff of longing and despair”. –BAFICI