Lafayette, Lafayette, is a young French electrician living alone in a basement, his days dimly lit by a sparse glow and the constant hum of aging cables. He toils under the roof of a waxwork museum owned by the cynical Andreas Flaxman, Andreas Flaxman, a man who treats his collection as a mirror to history and power. The museum’s halls are lined with meticulously crafted scenes from the Roman era, from the crucifixion to Caesar’s assassination, their lifelike figures prompting a quiet, unsettled wonder in Lafayette. He shares this dim world with his friend and fellow artist, the sculptor Luigi Nocello, Luigi Nocello, whose macabre displays and deft hands keep the exhibits alive. The atmosphere is thick with a sense of containment and control, yet also with an almost dreamlike strangeness that nudges at the boundaries between art, memory, and freedom. The film also touches on the women’s voices of a feminist theatre group, where the feminist actress Stefania Casini, Stefania Casini, and other performers push against gendered frames of violence and power, lending a fragile thread of resistance to Lafayette’s locked-in world.
During a rehearsal, the group discusses a provocative piece about rape, insisting that women can be as capable of violence as men. The moment shifts the mood from debate to danger when Lafayette is knocked unconscious with a Coca-Cola bottle, and the alluring Angelica, Abigail Clayton, volunteers to rape him. The incident cuts through the liminal tone of the city, leaving Lafayette suddenly exposed and vulnerable in a landscape that rarely offers clear exits. The city’s edge—Beside the Hudson River, at the Battery Park City construction site—becomes the setting where Lafayette reconnects with Luigi and a band of eccentrics who move through the story like echoes of another era, constantly on the brink of eruption or collapse. A small, almost sacred find punctuates this crossing: an abandoned baby chimpanzee resting in the palm of a gigantic King Kong sculpture, a creature that promises companionship and complicates Lafayette’s sense of autonomy. He decides to adopt the chimp, carrying it back to the museum where Flaxman cautions that the creature’s presence could seize Lafayette’s freedom unless he asserts control.
Paul Jefferson, William Berger of the State Foundation for Psychological Research, approaches Flaxman with a competing vision: to transform the face of the sculpture of Julius Caesar into that of John F. Kennedy, effectively rewriting the museum’s gaze and its political symbolism. The idea threads through the narrative like a vein of fate, challenging Lafayette’s already fragile sense of self as he navigates affection, ambition, and the creeping sense of being watched. Angelica, now drawn closer to Lafayette, moves into his cramped flat and shares in tending the infant chimp. But when Lafayette remains distant upon hearing that she is pregnant, she decides to leave, retreating to a shore where the sea seems to offer a different kind of answer to their tangled lives.
Alone again, Lafayette returns to the museum to find the baby ape dead, eaten by rats, a brutal reminder of fragility and decay. Despair gnaws at him, and he seeks human contact in a desperate break-in to the waxwork museum, where he is met with hostility from Flaxman. The confrontation escalates, and a fire—likely sparked by faulty wiring—engulfs the building and claims them both. In the aftermath, Angelica is seen on a quiet shoreline, playing contentedly with her child, a jarring image of continuity amid the ruins of the city and the lives it has touched. The film preserves a careful balance between wonder and menace, between small acts of tenderness and the pressure of a world that seems to have stopped listening to human voices.
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