A hunter comes upon a mysterious group of women bathing in a lake under the moonlight. When the women hear his approach, they grab feathery robes and turn into swans. The hunter returns the following nights, but keeps his distance to observe this remarkable vision. One evening, he boldly takes one of the feathery robes. The woman who owns the robe is unable to transform into a swan – but when her eyes meet the hunter’s gaze, there is immediate love.
What happens next? Well, the hunter and the swan woman share an apartment in Brooklyn, where they host a small dinner party. The unusual couple’s tale of meeting seems charming enough, but things go awry when the hunter inadvertently acknowledges that he was just grabbing the first feathery robe he could find. This angers his swan-woman, who assumed that he only had eyes for her, and the lovers’ spat embarrasses the guests joining them for dinner.
Emily Carmichael’s short takes the concept of ruffled feathers to a strange extreme. It is a well-made little film (especially in the moonlight sequences with the bathing beauties), but the one-joke story takes a wrong turn when the eponymous couple start bickering. Considering the wealth of missed possibilities that could have been spun out of a tale of a swan-woman in Brooklyn, the resulting effort in this short is unsatisfactory.
