At the very end of this play, within a film, we see an audience, clapping, than camera retreats, revealing another audience clapping watching the audience, watching the audience watching the play, and then we're forced to think of ourselves, watching the second audience, watching the first one, watching the play within a film.
The main story is a play, that was actualy enacted in the 17th century on the palace of the duke Cosimo DiMedici (Jonathan Lacey), of famous and declining family. It is on his shoulders that the fortune of the family depends, they keep him indoors, entertained and sheltered, thus ignorant, and religious in his own bizarre and fanatical way. The play he watches starts with a supposedly miraculous 'real' birth of a child to a virgin (Julia Ormond) in a poor and through plague and neglect decayed city, which cathedral (the most important part of the any settlement was the church in the minds of the Europeans of the time) is falling apart which is taken as a sign that God is punishing them.
The child was born to an ugly and very old mother of the family, and it cannot be believeable that she is the real mother, even though she has just given a birth, there on the stage, the virgin takes the child, locking its mother away and presenting herself as a real mother and the madonna, to the public, thirsty for miracles that would take them out of the misery they are in. She grants them blessings in exchange for gifts, money and prostitution to keep her father busy and the power goes straight to her head, portraying how corrupt is the operation.
A 'scientist', legitimized bastard son of a bishop (Ralph Fiennes), The Son, tries to prove that she is not the real mother or a virgin and she almost succeeds in persuading him by offering him her virginity, but the child gets involved, trying to save her life by preserving her virginity and makes a
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