‘Corsage’ Director Marie Kreutzer on Her Biggest Film to Date, Sisi Fever & Theatrical Versus Streaming – Special Preview

Patti Smith hosted a New York show of corsage Last week was one of several screenings since the Oscar-nominated Best International Feature film opened in Cannes, where star Vicky Krieps as Empress Elisabeth of Austria, or Sisi for short, was honored for Best Performance, Un Certain Regard. It’s fitting that avant-garde king Smith has come out to endorse a film about an iconoclastic princess.

The musician, poet and artist “has been a fan of Vicky ever since ghost wire– Krieps’ 2017 breakthrough role as a haute couture designer’s muse, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. “She even has one ghost wire Association. She saw them [Corsage] followers and kind of fell for it,” he says corsage Writer and director Marie Kreutzer.

In her film, Krieps is the muse of an empire as the beautiful, slightly eccentric, fashionable wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I in the late 19th century. She died in 1898 and remained one of Austria’s most popular historical figures. Kreutzer and Krieps discover the revolutionary modern thinker and norm-taker behind pictures of Sisi on coffee cups and candy boxes as well as older fairy tale adaptations on the screen.

It is unusual for the heroine of a 19th-century costume drama to sweat with stationary rings, or to weigh herself daily. It’s all “true what I’ve read about her as a person,” Kreutzer said. “The books that were the most important to me were the diaries of her daughter and lady-in-waiting Marie… She was really a wonderful, very intelligent woman and a good observer. And how she writes about them [is] very tender, loving, but at the same time so critical. I could read it over and over.”

Sisi is having a moment, including two current series and another film project on the way. “When we were in the financing, suddenly Sisi was everywhere. No idea why. There is no birthday or anything else that will explain it,” says Kreutzer. “I just think we’re always drawn to the stories” – out spencer to Blonde – “a tragic, beautiful woman stuck in her role.”

IFC Films presents corsage today at the IFC Center and film at Lincoln Center in NYC, next weekend in LA before a nationwide expansion. Other notable openings this weekend are women talk by United Artists Release and Life by Sony Pictures Classics.

The film Deadline Review here is a co-production between Austria, Luxembourg, Germany and France, Kreutzer’s biggest project to date. It opened in Austria in July and is still in cinemas today. “I’m very happy about that, because Austrians don’t really go into Austrian films.”

“Cinema is in a difficult position right now,” she admitted, as cinemas struggle to get past Covid and compete with streaming. “I think it is, yes it is. And we have to make the best of it.” Streaming creates opportunities for “the number of people to see my film that I could never do with a theatrical release”. She herself only streams series and has feature films ready for the big screen. “If I want to see a certain actor or actress or what a director has done, I have to see them in the cinema.”

Also in the cinema: UAR presents Sarah Polleys women talk by Orion Pictures at eight locations in NYC, LA, Chicago, Austin and Toronto, then expand with a wide release on January 20th. Based on the book by Miriam Toews with Brad Pitt as executive producer, the film began in Telluride. Appointment overview here. Rated 98% by critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The all-star cast includes Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey and Sheila McCarthy, as well as Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand. A group of women in a remote religious colony try to reconcile their beliefs with a series of abuses committed by the men there.

Sony Pictures Classics presents Oliver Hermanus’ Life on three screens in New York (Angelika, New Plaza Cinema) and LA (Royal). Written by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro and starring Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp and Tom Burke, the film tells the story of an ordinary man, reduced to a shadowy existence by years of oppressive office routine, who ‘ make an extreme effort to change. his boring life. This new version of the 1952 film ekiru Premiere by Akira Kurosawa at Sundance. A score of 93% critics. See deadline check.

Magnolia Pictures presents Emer Reynolds joyride in five theaters, including Glendale Laemmle in LA, and on VOD. Olivia Colman, Charlie Reed, Lochlann Ó Merain. A complicated middle-aged mother (Colman) and a troubled teenager (Reid) meet under unusual circumstances and travel together in Ireland.

Netflix opens Scott Cooper’s historical crime drama The pale blue eye at 55 theaters in 35 cities, including the Paris and the Quad in NYC, the Landmark Westwood, Los Feliz and the Bay Area in LA, before a January 6 streaming date. New York detective Augustus Landor (Bale) investigates a gruesome murder at the United States Military Academy at West Point around 1832, assisted by a young Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling). Appointment overview here.