Cannes Review: Vicky Krieps in ‘The Corsage’

The maid of Empress Elizabeth’s most powerful lady needed an hour each morning to get organized. Sis, wife of Emperor Franz-Joseph, was famous for her waist, which was probably 19 1/2 inches, as she was affectionately known to her subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; The slightest weight gain aroused great public interest. Like Vicki Cripps, who had great difficulty playing the Empress in Marie Kreitzer’s Un Certain Regard. Body, Actions imperial measures. I hope this is just a camera trick. Many corsets or bodices, a word often used in 19th-century Vienna royal dressing rooms, leave little room for small items such as ribs.

Sisi was a liberally educated Bavarian princess from royal but bohemian parents who married the emperor (Florian Teichtmeister: utterly pleased) at the age of 16 and had been on the throne for 44 years. Kreitzer’s script focuses on just one of those years: 1878, the year Sisi turned 40, was the median age at death among female subjects, as her doctor had noted. Of course, she’s more afraid of her age.

Since no one wants her opinion on state matters—she teases her husband by talking about tensions in Sarajevo at the breakfast table—she spends her dispersed energies on travel and technical innovations like a motion picture camera. Above all, it focuses on weight loss. Sisi has never seen a weight loss plan she doesn’t like. He takes a cold bath, swings gymnastic hoops in the living room, fencing like Zoro, and survives on a diet of mostly broth and half a helping of chocolate. He clearly had an eating disorder to bring the group down.

Historians of the time described him as extraordinarily selfish, even by the standards of people who could avoid shouting at servants at will. Kreitzer supports Sissy as a woman who perfectly thwarts the combined forces of patriarchy and court protocol, but she’s not the type of filmmaker to shy away from grim facts. His sister is the narcissist of the guide. Men should love him and women should admire him; Anyone who doesn’t love him enough should be shot. His closest wife, Marie (Katarina Lorenz), writes in her diary that she was impressed when we heard it in a strange voice. “It’s like a book to me, a puzzle on every page.” Hearing this makes me think it’s more of a Marie. You don’t want to be Sisi, but you don’t want to be introduced to her either. It is a company that is even in the cinema.

Visual structure by cinematographer Judith Kaufman Body It is as formal as the world represented in it. The dynamic camera angles—the top view of the dinner plates, the jumping of the horse’s lower stomach—are reminiscent of the piercing of a governess’ hat and remind us to be careful. A slow-moving series of stairs with frequent wide-angle shots showing a strangely symmetrical landscape – these devices seem as meticulous as the world they help represent.

All this goes against the weirdly anachronistic music – pretty standard now, but the steady guy who started playing “Help Me Spend the Night” in the background is still great. Body It is a period film that explores the nature and meaning of period films along with storytelling. Brilliant, somewhat didactic, both in terms of solid intentions and enthusiastic performance, and therefore, dare I say it? – Very, very Austrian. Which totally works for me.

The Empress was assassinated by an Italian anarchist in 1898, 20 years after the film was made. Given the character’s propensity for dangerous sports and his constant hunger, it is surprising to learn that he survived another twenty years in this life, not to mention his periodically weak thinking. Body This puts another end to it, but I doubt Creutzer was more interested in showing what happened to women, not just the emperor, with his biography of Elizabeth, by piercing through the layers of privilege and frustration, misery and nobility, narcissism and idealism less. Elizabeth, but any woman, was born into a life that offered everything and nothing.

When we see Elizabeth transport her incompetent and embarrassed daughter to a mental institution ward, hand in hand with patients telling her how beautiful she can be, we might think of a new royal figure. But Kreitzer does not make such banal comparisons. Her concern is not the Queen of Hearts, but matters of mind.