The film opens in July 1914 with a quiet, sepia-toned scene at Naples Harbor, just before the cruise ship Gloria N. slips away. The visual shift from silent projection to living color marks the moment when dialogue returns and the ship becomes a moving stage for a sprawling, Fellini-like panorama. On board, Freddie Jones as Orlando—the Italian journalist who narrates directly to the camera—explains that this voyage is no ordinary trip. It is a funeral procession meant to scatter the ashes of the beloved opera singer Edmea Tetua, near her birthplace on the island of Erimo.
Edmea Tetua, Janet Suzman, is celebrated in legend as the greatest singer of all time, her voice described in godlike terms that seem almost mythical. The narration sprinkles the voyage with sly, gossip-fueled humor about a parade of fantastical caricatures—opera singers, voice teachers, orchestra directors, theatre producers, actors, prime ministers, counts, princesses, grand dukes, and fans driven to feverish devotion. The ship becomes a floating gallery of personalities and pretensions, each figure longing for a moment in Edmea’s shadow.
A jealous and brazen soprano, Franca Maresa as Ildebranda, presses to uncover the secret of Edmea’s incomparable voice, while a bristle-haired Russian basso wanders the mess hall and hypnotizes a chicken with nothing but his voice. A curly-cued actor travels with his mother in a comical bid to charm sailors, and Peter Cellier as Sir Reginald Dongby, a voyeuristic English aristocrat, revels in watching his wife, Lady Violet. The ship’s social ladder is further complicated by the Grand Duke of Harzock—a portly, almost boyish aristocrat—whose blind sister, the dancer Pina Bausch, plots with her lover, the prime minister, to disinherit him. Meanwhile, the brooding Count of Bassano retreats to his cabin, which he has converted into a temple in memory of the diva.
A dreaded stench erupts from the hold and reveals a neglected rhinoceros, a misfit beast that must be washed and returned to the hold with water and hay, a surreal hiccup in the glamorous pageantry. On the ship’s third day, a crowd of shipwrecked Serbians appears on deck, refugees rescued and sheltered just long enough to be brought toward Italy. The Grand Duke and his entourage mistake the Serbians for terrorists and order the captain to segregate them, while the captain agrees to disperse Edmea’s ashes at Erimo first.
As the ceremony concludes, refugees are moved to lifeboats; a bomb hurled by a youthful Serbian screams through panic, and the Austro-Hungarian flagship answers with cannon fire. The Gloria N. sinks amid chaos: Albertini, conducted by Paolo Paoloni as Il Maestro Albertini, leads the musicians in a desperate, cinematic effort, the grand piano sliding across the deck and mirrors shattering as suitcases drift through flooded corridors. The workers behind the scenes reveal a grand mechanical ballet—giant hydraulic jacks, acres of plastic sea, and an army of technicians stoking smoke and fire effects—while an enigmatic figure, perhaps Orlando or Fellini himself, watches the chaos unfold.
The camera returns to a final, intimate image: Orlando in a lifeboat, the rhinoceros happily nibbling on hay beside him. In a rustic, almost deadpan aside, he confides, > Did you know, that a rhinoceros gives very good milk? <
This closing beat loops back to the voyage’s core illusion: what began as a ceremonial race through theatrical excess ends with a playful, self-referential wink. The film uses the spectacle of the sinking Gloria N. to question the difference between performance and catastrophe, and to remind the audience that what they are watching is as much a production behind the camera as it is a story on the deck. The ostentatious pageantry, the political infighting, the surreal comic touches, and the dreamlike absorption in Edmea Tetua’s legend all fold into a single, strange voyage that leaves viewers with a lingering mix of amusement, awe, and reflection.
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