Corsage Review: The Empress Elisabeth of Austria Has New Clothes

“She scares me so much.” This line, the first in writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s boldly restive biopic Corsage about Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps), is spoken by one handmaiden, Fini (Marlene Hauser), to another, Lotti (Johanna Mahaffy), with a mixture of terror and concern, as the empress undergoes one of her typically grueling endurance exercises. Submerged in a bathtub, testing how long she can stay underwater without breathing, Elisabeth seems almost at peace—an all-too-rare feeling for the lonely royal, who, as she approaches her 40th birthday, is gripped with melancholy.

In the next scene, Elisabeth, known by her childhood nickname Sisi, is being fitted into a bodice whose laces are pulled as tightly as possible, until her waistline has been crunched down to a mere 45 centimeters. Dissatisfied even with this ultra-slim measurement, the empress calls in Lotti to squeeze her abdomen even further. Sissi’s self-destructive relationship to this garment, whose French name lends Kreutzer’s film its title, is emblematic of the empress’s struggle to conform to 19th-century Europe’s presumptions of feminine beauty and behavior. Kreutzer, whose film impertinently blends Elisabeth’s biography with fully invented scenarios and anachronistic details, imagines Sissi not so much as a proto-feminist icon but as a deeply restless soul chafing against the social limitations of her day.

The empress is, in some sense, an all-too-willing victim of her times, embracing the Hapsburgian ideal of femininity with uncompromising zeal, eating little more than broth and orange slices while spending much of her free time fencing, horseback riding, and working out to maintain her excessively petite figure. As played by Krieps, though, there’s also an air of defiance to Elisabeth’s extreme weight-shedding activities, as if by throwing herself into the maintenance of an aristocratic image of womanhood with sufficient zeal, she can gain dominance over the very social strictures to which she’s been forced to adhere.

At the same time, Sisi also flouts the gender expectations of her time, particularly in her semi-romantic relationships with a series of men who aren’t her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister). During a dinner party at the English estate of María Christina of the Two Sicilies (Lilly Marie Tschörtner), she dons a blazing red dress and indulges in ostentatious flirtations with a dashing horseman, Bay Middleton (Colin Morgan), as Marie and Sissi’s son, Rudolf (Aaron Friesz), watch in chagrin. But as electric as Elisabeth’s courtships are, she resists consummating them. Instead, she finds sexual gratification in masturbation, while making periodic advances on the emperor, most of which he declines.

With its irreverent attitude toward historical accuracy and sympathetic take on the imperial ruling elite, Corsage often plays as a more sober spiritual sequel to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, trading that film’s punchy new wave and post-punk soundtrack for dirge-y covers of such ballads as Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” as well as a rendition of “As Tears Go By” performed by harpist Dina Nimax. If Coppola imagined lavish European palaces as the sites of freewheeling adolescent rebellion, Corsage envisions these same corridors as the grandiloquent backdrop of a midlife crisis.

If a period film about repression and middle-age angst sounds like a potentially fusty proposition, one of Corsage’s more remarkable features is vibrant, twitchy aliveness. It’s a work about stultification that never once feels stuffy. That’s thanks in great part to Krieps’s performance, which completely resists the maudlin or morose in favor of a knowing wryness. She plays Elisabeth as a woman who’s long understood that she’s profoundly unhappy but is only just now becoming aware that she’s powerless to find genuine satisfaction within the constricted parameters of her existence. There’s no change that can fix her fate because there’s no avenue for a woman in her position to truly be in control of her life—except by ending it.

And end it she does. (Spoilers herein.) In a completely invented deviation from Empress Elisabeth’s actual life, which was snuffed out in 1898 by an assassin’s hand in Geneva, Kreutzer allows Elisabeth to die on her own terms in 1878 after plunging into the deep blue waters of the Adriatic from the bow of a ship during a trip abroad. It’s Corsage’s most dramatic break with realism but certainly not its first. Peppered throughout are anachronistic details, such as metal panic bars on some doors and a modern mop propped against a wall, that prevent us from completely losing ourselves in this seemingly distant reality that’s so different from our own. Elisabeth’s story, as told in Corsage, is ultimately not really about the social strictures of the past, but rather the issues that women of all social strata have dealt with throughout history: self-doubt, repression, fear of aging, a lack of autonomy.

If Corsage’s narrative closes on a liberatory act of suicide, the film doesn’t quite end there. As the end credits roll, we’re treated to an extended sequence, shot in slow motion, in which Elisabeth, now clad in a free-flowing robe and cape rather than her rib-crunching corsage, dances in exaltation as “Italy” by Soap&Skin plays on the soundtrack. Has she died? Transcended? It’s hard to say. In an oddly cheeky touch, Elisabeth grows a mustache by the time the scene fades out, suggesting that if the problems of men and women are ever to be resolved, it may require a wholesale demolition of our received gender norms.