Playing fast and loose with historical fact, Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer and Luxembourg screen queen Vicky Krieps find a fruitful way to reinvent one of Austria’s most feted national icons in Corsage. World premiering in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes, this visually sumptuous, boldly experimental period piece puts a playfully revisionist spin on the later life of Duchess Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, who served as Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary from 1854 to 1898. Nicknamed “Sissi”, Elisabeth has been portrayed on screen and stage numerous times, notably by Romy Schneider in a series of syrupy 1950s biopics, then later by Ava Gardner in Terence Young’s Mayerling (1968).
Renowned as a great beauty in her youth, Elisabeth later developed an obsessive health and grooming regime which bordered on masochism, refused to be painted from the age of 32, and was rarely seen in public after turning 40. This retreat into midlife invisibility is where most conventional bio-dramas would end, but Kreutzer takes it as her starting point, seeking to rescue Sissi from becoming a minor supporting character in her own official biography. The painfully restrictive corsets and bodices that she squeezes her body into to maintain her slender figure here become symbolic of her entire life, stifled and crushed by the patriarchal demands and sexist expectations of her era.
In this regard, Corsage joins the long lineage of films that sympathetically portray female aristocrats as precious proto-feminist martyrs trapped in gilded cages, from William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) to Pablo Larrain’s Spencer (2021). But Kreutzer and Krieps have made a richer and stranger character study than that reductive line suggests, one clearly designed to resonate with contemporary gender politics, but which also has mischievous fun with narrow notions of historical truth and period drama convention. This is the duo’s second collaboration, following We Used to Be Cool (2016), and both share a strong creative chemistry here. A warm reception in Cannes should lead to wider crossover audiences beyond the art-house bubble, and deservedly so.
As she approaches 40, the average age at which most of her subjects die, Elisabeth (Krieps) is no longer deemed of much value as either dutiful sidekick or private companion by her husband Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister). A pompous prig with comical stick-on whiskers, the emperor is still fond of his wife, but she also exasperates him with her rebellious stunts and liberal views about how best to run the Austro-Hungarian empire. For her part, Elisabeth finds palace duties in the Habsburg monarchy increasingly stifling, resorting to staged fainting fits to escape formal events, and giving the finger to dull guests as she flounces out of stuffy royal banquets. She even employs a veiled stand-in to perform her more tedious ceremonial duties.
Instead of feasting with princes and barons, Elisabeth prefers communing with the inmates in Vienna’s asylums, where women are callously chained up for non-crimes like adultery or grieving a dead child. She also flees stifling Austria whenever possible, often travelling solo to spend long holidays with friends across Europe, sharing wild horse rides and erotically charged chocolate-pouring games with rumoured lovers like the swashbuckling Anglo-Scottish horseman George “Bay” Middleton (Colin Morgan). The flat English county of Northamptonshire looks suspiciously mountainous here, but Kreutzer is clearly not averse to a little poetic license. Print the legend. Or, failing that, create the legend from scratch, then embroider it with gossip and speculation. And chocolate.
Kreutzer and Krieps paint a loopy, dreamy, imaginative portrait of Elisabeth as a woman ahead of her time, with outspoken opinions and progressive views, who delights in the sensual pleasures of smoking, masturbation and the medicinal use of heroin. Sometimes all at once. Corsage also shows how the change-hungry empress enthusiastically embraced modern technology, endorsing a French inventor’s offer to film her using a prototype moving picture camera, an archly retro aesthetic detour which Kreutzer builds into a striking visual motif.
As Corsage develops, these distant echoes from some unborn future become increasingly prominent. Jarringly contemporary items pop up in the background: a motorised tractor, telegraph wires, even a modern cruise ship. The soundtrack by French avant-folk chanteuse Camille is knowingly anachronistic too, especially a handful of elegantly staged musical vignettes featuring retro-fitted arrangements of 20th century pop tunes including Help Me Make It Through The Night and As Tears Go By. The latter song, made famous by Marianne Faithfull, may even be a sly inside joke, a winking allusion to Faithfull’s ancestral roots in Austrian nobility. Judith Kaufmann’s luscious cinematography, Monika Buttinger’s exquisite costumes and Martin Reiter’s beautiful production design all add up to a voluptuous sensory package.
The real Elisabeth died in 1898 at the age of 60, slain in a random knife attack by an Italian anarchist as she boarded a boat on Lake Geneva. Kreutzer only alludes to this event opaquely with a dreamlike, symbolic, sea-going finale. Corsage can feel maddeningly cryptic at times, mostly in inventive ways, but the narrative occasionally risks slipping its moorings and drifting off into pure abstraction. This is a minor complaint in an otherwise richly enjoyable, admirably ambitious film. Besides, as Kreutzer says in her Cannes press notes, “I was never interested in making a nice, tidy biopic.” Mission accomplished, right down the boldly surreal final credits sequence, which features Krieps dancing with joyous abandon to bouncy Europop and sporting male facial hair. Dadaist drag at the disco? Yas queen.
Director, screenwriter: Marie Kreutzer
Vicky Krieps, Florian Teichtmeister, Katharina Lorenz, Jeanne Werner, Alma Hasun, Colin Morgan
Producers: Alexander Glehr, Johanna Scherz
Co-producers: Bernard Michaux, Janine Jackowski, Jonas Dornbach, Maren Ade, Jean-Christophe Reymond
Executive Producer: Vicky Krieps
Cinematography: Judith Kaufmann
Editing: Ulrike Kofler
Production designer: Martin Reiter
Costume designer: Monika Buttinger
Music: Camille
Production: Film AG (Austria)
World sales: MK2
Venue: Cannes film festival (Un Certain Regard)
In German
112 minutes
