Vienna, 1878. At yet another interminable palace banquet, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (a phenomenal Vicky Krieps) suddenly realises that, frankly, she no longer gives a damn. Glaring across the table at her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph, who is in close conversation with the Hungarian statesman Gyula Andrássy, Elisabeth sparks up a gold-tipped cigarette and murmurs, “I simply wish that I was allowed to talk as well.” Then, in a clear breach of imperial protocol, she abruptly stands and sweeps out of the dining room, flipping the bird at the assembled guests and silencing the tinkling small talk once and for all. It’s a glorious moment in Marie Kreutzer’s new film Corsage — and it was unscripted.
“I never planned that I was going to do these things,” says Krieps over the phone. “It was more, I wanted to do her justice — or what I understood of her. I could feel her trapped inside a Ming vase or something, I knew I had to bring her out.”
The scene encapsulates perfectly the punky, subversive spirit of the film. Corsage is no ordinary costume drama, but a boldly unconventional portrait of the empress, often known as Sissi, blending fact with invention, historical details with blatant anachronisms. It follows Elisabeth, formerly the most decorative treasure in the Austro-Hungarian empire, as she turns 40 and has to contend with relentless scrutiny of her fading beauty. It shows a woman who, despite the power attached to her title, has very little actual control. And, in a thematic parallel with Krieps’s breakthrough role opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, it shows the lengths to which Elisabeth must go to exert some agency in a world dominated by powerful men.
The approach, says Krieps, evolved thanks to a sense of creative freedom, fun and, she stresses, “Playing. That’s the movie — it’s us playing with time, playing with all the concepts we have in our minds of this world: the concept of a woman, the concept of an empress, the concept of a mother, the concept of a movie — how a movie is done. These elements are there to destabilise the audience.”
It’s a refreshing contrast to previous depictions of the empress, specifically the Romy Schneider-starring Sissi trilogy of the mid-1950s. A series characterised by kitsch Mills & Boon romanticism, the Sissi films are, in their way, as historically revisionist as Corsage. But where Marie Kreutzer’s approach is daring and irreverent, the Sissi films are frothy and unchallenging. Schneider’s empress is pliable and adorable while Krieps’s version is complicated and angular, and has both the capacity and the inclination to be a world-class bitch to all around her.
Corsage is not the first film to kick against the stuffy, stodgy confines of the traditional costume drama. Recent examples include 2020’s Miss Marx, which starred Romola Garai as Eleanor, daughter of Karl Marx, and employed a chaotic combination of techniques including dance sequences, lots of fourth-wall-smashing and black-and-white photos of the 1980s UK miners’ strike to evoke Eleanor’s proto-feminist credentials.
More successful, and an obvious comparison for Corsage, is Sofia Coppola’s minxy, playful portrait of Marie Antoinette (2006). The two films share a gleeful iconoclasm and an inclination to puncture the airless propriety of the period drama, both embrace the unlovable elements of their subjects, both make bold design decisions in service of the storytelling and character details. In Coppola’s film — a giddy, sugar-rush of a movie — the style is frivolous, full of ribbons and fripperies: Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is arrested in childhood, cocooned from the adult world by privilege and indulgence. In Corsage, interiors which at first seem opulent are revealed to be rife with decay, neglect and peeling paint, suggesting that time is running out for the empire of which Elisabeth is a decorative figurehead.
There’s also a kinship between Corsage and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018), which turns a distorting fish-eye lens on another royal woman in a gilded cage: England’s Queen Anne (played by Olivia Colman). Lanthimos has always teased out the grotesque elements of his subjects, and the early-18th-century royal court is no exception: it’s a playground for plotting toffs. Hobbies and interests include wearing enormous elaborate wigs, swearing, duck racing and pelting naked men with oranges.
But perhaps Corsage has most in common with the work of Derek Jarman. The late British director was always intrigued by the idea that the division between the past and the present was a permeable one: he introduced a time-travelling Queen Elizabeth I to a dystopian late 1970s London in the punk nihilist fantasy Jubilee (1978). But Jarman’s main assault on the historical movie came later, with Caravaggio, his thrillingly transgressive 1986 portrait of the Renaissance painter. The film came at a time when much period cinema, and certainly Britain’s prestige costume drama output, was particularly conservative: shackled by pedantic period accuracy, creatively inert, the movie equivalent of a set of commemorative plates. There had been a hint of rebellion two years earlier with Miloš Forman’s exuberantly outré Oscar-winner Amadeus. But Caravaggio felt genuinely new.
Jarman drew parallels between the violence of the artist’s life, passions and creativity, and his oppression by the Catholic church, as well as the mid-1980s gay experience of living with the threat of Aids and the openly hostile Thatcher government. He seeded the painterly compositions of the film with anachronistic details: an aristocrat pulls out a pocket calculator and a young man tinkers with a motorbike. Time collapses in on itself.
In Corsage, Kreutzer employs a similar technique. Little anachronistic details litter the picture: a plastic bucket and mop in a passageway; modern pop reworked into chamber music; a concrete wall; a not-quite-authentic doorway. This is, Kreutzer makes clear, a film that turns a knowing, contemporary eye on history. It encourages the audience to see parallels between Elisabeth and numerous more recent examples of women in the public eye who face obsessive scrutiny and criticism.
In common with Jarman’s work, there’s also a political element underpinning the radical film-making choices. And it’s this — the feminist reclamation of Elisabeth as a historical figure — that makes Corsage one of the most satisfying attempts to subvert the period picture. By disengaging from the dull details of historical accuracy, the film imagines a way for Sissi to free herself, both from the suffocating life she never wanted, and from her later status as a kitsch cultural figure.
“She has become merchandise in Vienna. Which for me was so tragic,” says Krieps, for whom there is an obvious personal parallel as well. “You don’t have to look very hard to see that this is Vicky giving the finger to the [film] industry. This is why I relate to her. Even if I suggested the film before Phantom Thread, it was after Phantom Thread that I received the script and I thought: ‘Oh my god, I know exactly how she felt now’ — in a much smaller scale of course. But I could understand the strangeness of suddenly being looked at. I never wanted to change and I felt that people wanted me to change. So this film is very much my ‘fuck you’ to the industry.”
‘Corsage’ is in UK and US cinemas from December 23
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