That Martin Scorsese, the chronicler of urban violence, the poet of sin and redemption consumed on the hot asphalt of Little Italy, decided to adapt Edith Wharton might have seemed heresy in 1993, a bizarre end-of-empire whim, almost an intellectual caprice. Instead, looking back today, The Age of Innocence is not only one of his most sumptuous and heartbreaking films, but also the key to understanding his entire oeuvre. It is a gangster film in which the weapons are oyster forks and gossip whispered in salons, and death sentences are handed down with a cordial smile behind a feather fan.

The New York of the 1870s that Scorsese depicts is not a world alien to his universe, but its progenitor, its source code. The rigid, immutable tribal laws of the Gilded Age, that caste system masked by etiquette, are not so different from the mafia code of silence in Goodfellas. The rules are different, blood does not flow in the streets, but the violence is just as lethal. It is velvet violence, a respectable cruelty that annihilates the soul rather than the body. Scorsese, as a perfect anthropologist of American tribalism, understands that every community, from Five Points to Park Avenue, is based on rituals, taboos, and human sacrifices. In this case, the sacrificial victim is individual passion, immolated on the altar of “form.”

The film is an autopsy, conducted with the precision of a surgeon and the passion of a lover. Michael Ballhaus's camera does not merely record, but investigates, rummages, almost violating the intimacy of a world obsessed with surface. Every detail of Dante Ferretti and Gabriella Pescucci's magnificent mise-en-scène—a glove slowly removed, the color of a flower in a glance, the arrangement of cutlery on a laid table—becomes an emotional hieroglyph, a clue at the scene of a sentimental crime. Scorsese, the cinephile nerd par excellence, is not content to recreate an era: he dissects it. His direction is an act of archaeology of desire. The rapid inserts, the saturated color fades (the yellow of roses, the red of fire), the freeze frames that look like daguerreotypes of a dying emotion, are the unmistakable signature of Thelma Schoonmaker, who applies her rhythmic, modernist editing to seemingly classic material, creating an almost unbearable tension between the static nature of society and the inner turmoil of the characters.

The protagonist, Newland Archer (a monumental Daniel Day-Lewis in his repression, a man imprisoned in his own impeccability), is the Henry Hill of this world. He is a man of the system, he knows and respects its rules, but an external force—Countess Ellen Olenska (an ethereal and tragic Michelle Pfeiffer, a ghost of a possible life)—shows him the emptiness of his gilded cage. Ellen is not a femme fatale; she is simply a free woman, or at least one who longs to be, and for this reason she is a foreign body, a virus that the immune system of Old New York must expel at all costs. And the agent of this expulsion, the most ruthless guardian of tradition, is his fiancée, the “pure” May Welland. Winona Ryder gives one of her most subtle and disturbing performances, embodying the perfect fusion of innocence and ruthlessness. Her May is not stupid; she is the perfect product of her environment, an exterminating angel in white gloves whose most lethal weapon is her apparent fragility. The scene in which she reveals her pregnancy to Archer, sealing his fate, is a masterpiece of psychological violence worthy of a corseted Godfather.

But where Scorsese transcends simple costume drama is in his dialogue with the history of cinema and literature. The Age of Innocence is the more neurotic and desperate American brother of Visconti's The Leopard. Both films are elegies for an aristocracy clinging to its rituals while the outside world changes inexorably. The ball in Visconti, the dinners and evenings at the opera in Scorsese: these are social liturgies that mask the fear of the end. There is, however, a fundamental difference: while the Prince of Salina observes the decline with cynical, melancholic awareness, Newland Archer is a man who still fights, who believes for a moment that he can escape, making his final defeat even more bitter.

And one could venture an even more unusual, almost heretical parallel with the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu. As in the family dramas of the Japanese master, the real battlefield in The Age of Innocence is the space of the unsaid. The tension does not lie in the dialogue, which is often banal and codified, but in the glances, the pauses, the missed gestures. The tragedy unfolds in the silence between words, in the void that separates two people sitting in the same living room. Scorsese, like Ozu, understands that the strongest chains are the invisible ones of social duty and family convention.

Tying it all together is a brilliant meta-textual element: the narrating voice of Joanne Woodward. It is not a simple expository device, but the voice of Edith Wharton herself, the spirit of the novel manifesting itself to guide us through this labyrinth of signs and meanings. It is an omniscient, cultured, slightly ironic voice that acts like a Greek chorus, commenting, explaining codes that are incomprehensible to us moderns, and creating a critical distance that transforms the viewer from an emotional participant to an entomologist, intent on studying these strange, beautiful, and cruel insects trapped in the amber of the past.

The epilogue, set decades later, is one of the most devastating endings in the history of cinema. The elderly Archer, in Paris, is faced with the possibility of seeing Ellen again. But he stops, choosing not to go up. He prefers to cherish the memory of that passion as something perfect and intact, a work of art in the gallery of his memory, rather than confront reality. That final renunciation encapsulates the entire film: the triumph of form over substance, of memory over life. Scorsese tells us that The Age of Innocence was not innocent at all; it was an era of calculated ferocity, whose greatest cruelty was to deny people the chance to simply be themselves. And in making this film, seemingly so far removed from his canon, Scorsese has do nothing but come home, demonstrating that the mechanisms of human cruelty, whether manifested by a gunshot in an alley or a rejected dinner invitation, remain terribly, universally the same. An absolute masterpiece, glacial and incandescent.