Corsage
Directed by Marie Kreutzer
Running time: 2hrs15 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Vicky Krieps stars in Corsage
“Iconic” is a much-abused adjective these days, but the Empress Elisabeth of Austria — “Sissi” to her friends, as well as her obsessive followers over generations — earns it in the most literal sense. An object of public fascination and cultivated mystique in her 19th-century lifetime, she has since become a quasi-mythic emblem of European royal glamour, inspiring the vastly popular, high-kitsch “Sissi” trilogy of corset dramas starring Romy Schneider, and launching a million dainty porcelain figurines — icons, if you will — in her name, coveted by devoted collectors.
Corsage is not a film for those collectors. Marie Kreutzer’s freely imagined biopic of the Empress shatters history and fragile imagery with a gleeful, graceful sweep of the arm, like a child tipping an entire fine-china dinner service off a dining room table. Playing wryly with anachronism before boldly abandoning historical reality entirely, it nonetheless stays true to the spirit — as defined by legend, at least — of its subject, rather like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, albeit with a whole lot less blush-pink clutter. Played with dry, faintly venomous imperiousness by a brilliant Vicky Krieps, this film’s Sissi is an austerely chic mistress. Apt to dismiss any handmaiden who doesn’t cinch her corset quite tightly enough in the morning, she demands equally punishing rigour in all aspects of life — fastidiously strategising her diet, exercise regime and even her sex life — while simultaneously railing against a courtly, patriarchal lifestyle in which she feels she can’t breathe. If that sounds hypocritical, you wouldn’t dare tell her.
And so she pursues escape, albeit on her strict terms: travelling around Europe in high style and retreating from her living-dead husband Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister), and eventually letting even her high-maintenance image loose. (When Sissi hacks off her own extravagantly piled and styled hair, another servant goes into shock; with a thin smile, the Empress declares that the girl is now free of her “life’s work”.) And as Corsage builds, with a butterflies-in-the-stomach sense of rebellious subterfuge, to a wildly rule-breaking ending, Kreutzer’s exquisitely precise aesthetic lashes out too: modern architectural detailing intrudes on palatial production design; songs by Kris Kristofferson and the Rolling Stones are woven into the harp-heavy Viennese repertoire; Judith Kaufmann’s cool, bracing cinematography maintains the grit and candour of vérité, not varnished costume drama. Best of all, Krieps’ witty, sexy, serpentine performance finds the angular feminine modernity in a figure too long encased in a ceramic glaze. All hail the redefined icon.
CORSAGE (2022) Written by Marie Kreutzer | Shot by Judith Kaufmann | Edited by Ulrike Kofler