Corsage

Avoiding all bland tropes of the royal biopic, Marie Kreutzer provides a haunting journey of vanity and autonomy led by the incredible Vicky Krieps.

Corsage could be a spiritual sister of Marie Antoinette, Spencer, or The Favourite by its focus on a royal unraveling from the pressures of their monarchy. In the center is a historical figure that hasn’t had its big cinema moment yet compared to other monarchs. The subject is Empress Elisabeth of Austria (known as Sissi) Kreutzer follows the internal prison created by royalty. Kreutzer immerses her audience into the loneliness and angst of the empress.  

Set in 1877 Vienna when Sissi is prepping to turn 40, the average life expectancy for a woman during that time. The upcoming celebrations bring the empress into melancholy with her passionate yet discontent life. A life full of a loveless marriage, ageism, and body shaming. A tight corset pulled to get her down to an 18-inch waist symbolizes her struggle to fit in with the century’s beauty and behavior standards for women. She spends her days alone, visiting the empty rooms of the manner held down by the restraints of clothes and society. She can present herself to look the part but on the inside, she is full of dread. The fictional moments and self-destructive tendencies imagine Sissi as a restless soul meeting her limitation. 

Multiple times throughout the film the empress switches from embracing the female role to rejecting it. She spends time eating and working out to stay petite with a sense of defiance. If she can keep up this maintenance, she can use it to dominate the spaces she is forced to operate in. In her romantic life, she takes up many lovers who aren’t her husband. Wearing a red dress at a dinner party, she indulges in a flirtatious exchange with a horseman as her son watches. Though these relationships have the spark she longs for she never goes through with consummating any of them. Her sexual gratification comes from masturbation while being declined by her husband as she makes advances on him.

Kreutzer uses the setting of royalty as an exploration of the midlife crisis. Although this coverage of middle age sounds depressing, Kriep’s performance maintains a vibrancy throughout the film. She plays Sissi as a woman who has been unhappy for a long time but has become self-aware that she doesn’t have the power to find authenticity within her constricted barriers. There is no way out of life for a woman like her except death. Kreutzer lets Sissi take control in by having her kill herself.

Kreutzer rewrites the history of Sissi finally allowing her the sovereignty she so desperately craved.