Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, France, 2022
Directed by Marie Kreutzer
With Vicky Krieps (Empress Elizabeth), Florian Teichtmeister (Emperor Franz Josef), Aaron Friesz (Crown Prince Rudolf), Rosa Hajjaj (Valerie), Manuel Rubey (King Ludwig II of Bavaria), Katharina Lorenz (Marie Festetics)
The narrative is a loose but carefully dated chronicle of a year in the life of Elizabeth, Empress of Austria and Hungary, from the end of 1877, marked by her 40th birthday, to the fall of 1878, as the Austrian-Hungarian Empire ruled by her husband Emperor Franz Josef is busy winning more influence and power, grabbing the Ottoman territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina amidst the growing restlessness of the European peoples ruled by Constantinople. Or is it?
The film readily signals, though eccentric behaviors revealing a mischievous, feisty, and dissatisfied empress, that, that even if it is a biopic and an entertaining period piece, it has no intention to meet the audience’s usual expectations, even less to give a nod to the previous embodiment of a monarch also known as Sissi, the lavish, schmaltzy, innocuous 1955 film of Ernst Marischka (whose title is simply that familiar and childish nickname the empress got and which featured to wide success a young actress who then would struggle to get rid of all the cute and kitsch imagery the film created around her charm, Romy Schneider – Schneider’s curse had been made worse by the fact that, due to popular success, two others films featuring that Sissi were shot, and that the three of them had been tirelessly broadcast on television channels for decades).
It is not just that quite a different Elizabeth emerges: the film quickly plays an unorthodox soundtrack which mainly ignores classical music and would focus on pop and electronic sounds, with the big contribution of French artist Camille. It counter-intuitively shots lavish places highlighting unadorned, worn-out corners (the naked corridor joining the empress’ room to others or the decrepit walls of a Bavarian castle) instead of striving to reconstruct the most glitzy atmosphere associated with the historical characters and their work and relishing in the luxury defining famous Vienna buildings, even transforming at one point the volume of a room. And it dares to display a most shocking anachronism for the moviegoers, as Elizabeth meets with a strange French inventor who has invented a process to record not just a still photograph but in fact moving images – cinema can be used by the empress more nearly two decades before it really took off.
The short black and white reel the inventor shot with the empress playfully standing as the subject is not only played in the editing: it is later reused and even tweaked to display another character, her son, Crown Prince Rudolf. That latter shot, given the events the screenplay has organized, is absolutely implausible and really preposterous. But that fantastic spin on an already warped and absurd take on history embodies what is perhaps the real meaning of what the film tells about Elizabeth: more that an impish, teasing instance of alternate history, it is the exploration of an increasingly tormented and frustrated state of mind. The film is based on the hypothesis that the freshly 40-year old empress is undergoing an existential crisis and what she does but also what she experiences are very much like fantasies flowing in her mind as she struggles to express her rawest, strongest, most sincere and deep-felt sentiments and needs even as she is in a cage and a corset – that is, locked inside the trappings and duties of her political and social position, and compelled to fit all the time and perfectly to an idealized image of herself and her body.
The film in a way goes far into the vivid, often comic, always surprising, highly contentious to many admirers of Sissi (both the famous real person and the old film persona), depiction of an obstreperous character who despises what she is forced to do and yearns for something else. The first incident is telling: as she attends a ceremony with her husband and listen to the compliments of officials, she suddenly faints; but a scene later, as she smokes and banters with her beloved cousin, famously eccentric Bavaria’s King Ludwig II, she discloses how she just faked it – it was all about making believe just to break free from duties a few hours.
As the film proceeds, it is no longer about a few hours, but endless nights and days the empress tries to spend on her own, in foolish as well as romantic ways, responding to her whims and defying conventions, with more deceptions and outrageous behaviors in store, images of her own making competing with the official images designed for her by politics, tradition, propriety. She still attends those dreary state dinners and wears that damned corset, watching sullenly her weight, but as time goes by she does not care hiding her contempt for the part she is forced to play. Eventually, she would even use her main lady-in-waiting, Marie Festetics, as a stand-in the outer world reverentially observes while she tastes heroin and gulps down sweets hidden away in a bedroom and later pretends to be a lady-in-waiting to have the fun of exploring a ship – and diving into the deep blue sea, a most symbolic, vibrant ending shot for a film that has explored a state of mind that feels incredible modern and freed from the notions that history books, popular adoration, entertainment have attached to her.
“Corsage” could have been bolder in presenting that rebellious, troubled, excited mind by blurring further reality and fantasy, though it does delivers stunning images (like that room getting smaller or blowing up to its real scale depending on whether Elizabeth is alone or not) and increasingly implausible situations that suggest the scenes are a projection of a troubled mind (like lying in the bed of a wounded soldier). It remains tame to an extent, staying grounded into a degree of historical accurateness to underline how far apart she is from the rest of the family. However sympathetic to her mother’s dissatisfaction he may be, Rudolf still worries more about the image she projects and her relations with her father, while his sister Valerie cannot understand her mother, feeling ashamed or appalled by her antics. The emperor is not cast as uniformly bad and stubborn, far from it, but remains dismayed to watch his wife drifting away. And there is politics too: the empress is cast as a maverick highly partial to Hungary and opposed to the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, looking like an inspired opponent to an Austrian rule bound to collapse.
So Sissi is alone and struggling to find happiness: that makes it a likable and relatable character. But how the film handles the state of mind that at 40 this implies is far more baffling and yet really thrilling from an artistic and intellectual point of view. This is a biopic that enjoys to roil the waters the genre usually sails and to propose a personal vision that is as amazing as it is entertaining – and also thought-provoking. It is also another superb performance by Vicki Krieps, who is the film’s executive producer – Krieps was highly motivated by the idea of painting this idealized monarch in a way far more attuned to the modern ways of appreciating womanhood and its representations and contradictions, this effort to deconstruct what we used to see to reconstruct what a woman could feel. And she shows it, powerfully and brilliantly.