While the public appetite for aristocratic drama, both historical and contemporary, remains insatiable, we’ll continue to see projects that expect the viewer to empathise with the travails of those possessed of obscene wealth, status, or both. There are a few ways to achieve this. A Royal Affair plays its historical heroine Caroline Mathilde as a light of the Enlightenment looking to benefit all of society, serving its drama straight with a palatable splash of iconoclastic republican subtext. At the other end of the spectrum, both The Favourite and The Great acknowledge the absurdity of inherited titles and gleefully interpret history as farce, Corsage, the much-heralded depiction of rebellious Empress Elisabeth of Austria is playfully spiked with anachronisms yet demands we never take the problems of its spirited protagonist less than seriously. It’s testament to the imperious talent of Vicky Krieps that it just about succeeds in its aims through her performance as a curiously contemporary consort, but it still feels like a stretch to fully submit to the concerns of its pampered Empress.
Yet a gilded cage is a cage nonetheless and Corsage follows Empress Sisi (Krieps) as she wrestles with turning 40 as a prominent but ultimately decorative royal figurehead with little actual autonomy. At 40, she’s prematurely dismissed as an old woman by society. Having been celebrated for her beauty, a beauty she’s gone to stringent lengths to maintain for nearly a quarter of a century, this is a bitter pill to swallow. She’s also semi-estranged from her husband Franz Joseph I (Florian Teichtmeister) and gossip around her alleged infidelities are beginning to tarnish her reputation more than the appearance of a few crow’s feet ever could. She resolves to wrestle back control of her own image, regardless of the consequences.
In Kreutzer’s take, Elisabeth is a figure both constrained by the pressures of the royal court (cue much hauling at corsets) and adrift in solitude in the huge crumbling rooms of various European estates (including Easton Neston, belonging to the 5th Earl Spencer, an ancestor of Diana’s for fans of blunt historical parallels). Very much a character piece, the viewer is with her in practically every frame, and Krieps is sublime. No idle caricature, her Elisabeth is fluent in multiple languages, is formidably intelligent, and loves horse riding as a brief escape from it all. She’s also pampered, petulant, and childish on occasion, and blind to the fact she perpetuates the very royal prerogatives that bind her; most notably in denying her lady-in-waiting Marie Festetics (Katharina Lorenz) her right to accept a marriage proposal, selfishly claiming Elisabeth needs her more than any husband.
Elisabeth’s anachronistic modernity is mirrored in the film’s aesthetic. Kreutzer presents a fictionalised meeting with pioneer of the moving image Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield), and jumps from one month to the next are often punctuated with a playful Sisi mugging in front of the new technology. The score by French singer Camille eschews the expected chamber music in favour of breathy pop sultriness with various version of ‘She Was‘ utilised as a leitmotif. It doesn’t go quite as far into revisionist girl boss territory as Sofia Coppola’s irreverent Marie Antoinette, but despite Kreutzer’s dismissing the comparison with splendid Teutonic bluntness, it’s difficult not to draw connections. It also occasionally brings to mind Pablo Larrain’s Spencer on occasion as Sisi unravels in the face of massed ranks of aristocratic disapproval.
Therein lies the central problem that no amount of postmodern pizazz can cover. Marie Antionette never pretends to be anything other than a fun romp, and Spencer is presented almost like a horror movie, with Diana trapped in a Sandringham depicted as a psycho-geographic nightmare with an ever-diminishing number of safe spaces. Corsage too often feels like the kind of stately and slightly funereal period drama that it initially appears to rail against. Despite some truly memorable scenes – usually when Sisi is at her most exuberant – there is a certain repetitive nature to much of the narrative, and there’s a definite lack of momentum in the storytelling. Despite some telling flaws, Corsage is an elegantly presented drama that is an awards-worthy showcase for Vicky Krieps. Very much support to Daniel Day-Lewis in her breakout role in Phantom Thread, part of an ensemble in Bergman Island, and left to flounder by the sea in the ridiculous Old, Corsage demonstrates beyond doubt that she is a spectacular talent.
At cinemas nationwide now