La Sposa Cadavere

The cosplay shoot: La Sposa Cadavere

Made for Halloween with Nanami and Manuel Priori, the set revisits a few scenes from the well-known corpse bride film, rebuilt inside the church of Capranica.

The light is cold, dominated by a deep blue that wraps the stone walls and the carved monuments in the background; the only warm notes come from the candles of a candelabrum, barely warming the faces and the edges of the garments. Haze hanging in the air softens the outlines and pushes the architecture back, turning the columns, the niches and the reclining figures of the tombs into a stage backdrop that seems to retreat with every frame.

She moves through the space slowly, leaning on the piano or standing still beside him, her gaze often turned elsewhere; he accompanies her, her hand in his, with a stiffer, more restrained bearing. The worn white of the dress and the pale blue hair stand out against the greys and browns of his suit, within an almost monochrome palette.

The set alternates different rhythms. There are the wide frames, where the two figures look tiny against the bulk of the funerary monument, held at the centre like a wedding photograph of a ceremony no one ever performed. There are the close-ups at the piano, where the two faces almost touch and the expressions diverge: she suspended, elsewhere, he tense, his eyes searching for whoever is watching. And there is the detail of the joined hands, cropped tight on the side of the dress and on the pinstriped trousers, the only moment when the story narrows down to a single point of contact and little else.

The props stay few and recurring: the veil, the crown of flowers, the dark bouquet held in her lap, the candelabrum raised like a torch in the dark. Everything else is left to the haze, to the colour, and to the silence that seems to fill the nave around them.