Barry Lyndon
Barry Lyndon
In a time draped in lace‑rimmed streets and the soft hum of eighteenth‑century parlours,
a lad of rough coat and quick wit set his eyes on fortune’s green‑stained promise.
He began in the kitchens, scratching life into a line of dust–covered pans,
but hailed himself as a future gentleman—his heart a compass, his tongue a blade.
The scene opens amid the rain‑slick cobbles of London,
the steam‑whipped sails of the Commonwealth mooring by the Thames.
Barry, in a half‑a‑flanneled coat, eyes bright with calculation,
murmurs to the city, “I shall make my name in the houses of drumming mirrors.”
He clogs into the gait of aristocracy, a hat askew, a grin that chokes all queer thought:
Professional charm, luminous as Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, yet impalpable.
He learns the court’s whispers, the shadowed dances of Fraser’s foibles;
each handshake measured by the silver weight of a pennysaver.
He requests—“Proceed, Miss, I am willing to be your second most loyal,”
and backs his hope upon a painting hung warm in an old master’s over‑tuned mirror.
He borrows a lady, and she, a favourite of the stage, dangles partake of his daring.
Beside his new wife, the air tastes of powdered sugar—an enquiry into “how streaks of pride tastes in rain?”
But the sun burns through the veil of freedom: gilded debts, a crumbling lineage,
and the laugh of a guillotine. With a splash of oil on grandeur, he stabs a fortune into the chest of a queen:
“Let us realise the regrets of kings."
He pours his voyage into canvases of perfume, though hands bleed of black‑top starlight.
A new house, the old carriage, the white‑washed walls, all as static as a fragment of a moment in a film:
long sequences, heavy with awe, patience, a panoramic cradle of woes.
Kubrick, in his spectral hush, watches the boy melt into a man, a suit of both scars and hopes.
He loses kingship to a widowed moolah of abandon; the bludgeoning of the pointed coin in his fist.
Barry scorns the rose‑taste of triumph—a parade of human error.
His realise is not a lyric, but a shudder: the gambler’s curse hatched from a dynasty’s finale.
As dusk falls, he succumbs to a present that is ink‑shattered and beyond the courtroom’s flicker.
His heart returns to the city’s alley, once again in the silver any, an existence of fairness and liberty—
the teeth of a crowning swan plucked from a ballet of deadlines sifted through the dark, flickered beams.
On the final day—spent in the sudden haze of an evening—Barry disembarks, eyes full of teeth:
he wishes himself a bottle of wine, a child of the sane, ever at peace with the price of an earthen cup.
The prime gilt of a man's old eyes—his hands all a‑hiding—soaked in the laughter of the past.
The story of Barry Lyndon reads like an eloquent acmon,
the colour of life shaded in wealth, dread, for everyone asking a life that spills a cheek.
His compass is bone‑light, his future a swinging of conga‑like jigsaw, borrowed from the intrinsically colourful.
The final shot falls upon a boy’s image: a frightening bullet—
the ride of stealing, a signature of the society he breaks,
and thus we see Barry’s story in the light of the film: “The Great” and “The Small” in one picture, bid, near‑together.
