Corsage

dir: Marie Kreutzer

2022

I cannot tell you how little I care about the lives of aristocrats, any aristocrats.

Oh wait, I just did. I am no royalist, no defender of monarchies or privilege, let me tell you for free. My feelings towards the divinely anointed and all new fangled tech billionaires or old school robber barons are best summed up by the title of and lyrics to the Motörhead song Eat the Rich, which advocates for a very elegant solution to the eternal question of “how best do we dispense with this bullshit?”

So any and all of my appreciation for any flick should never be construed as an endorsement or support for any of these stratified lies of divine right or superiority-from-birth ideas.

There are, all the same, some great character studies in literature and film arising from depicting the lives of these awful people, make no mistake. Any character study of any historic person is only as powerful as the actor that depicts them, and the writer / director bringing them to life, all the same, whether they be princes or paupers or both.

I have never given much thought to the so-called Empress Sisi (Vicky Krieps) of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (RIP Sisi and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, rest in power), and this flick is unlikely to cause me to fall down a rabbit hole of finding out everything about her. But I did enjoy watching Corsage, because it’s a very well made film with a luminous central performance by an amazing actor.

Corsage in the context of this flick is not a reference to that strange bouquet or posy of flowers that teenaged American high schoolers are given as a token earning the right to engage in some unseemly and not always entirely consensual activities after The Prom. That is something I know about only through decades of exposure to American movies and television, since it doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists anywhere else (and no I’m not talking about school formals etc).

Corsage here is a reference to the corset that we often watch Sisi being laced into. Of course, those of us who have been watching period piece / Regency bullshit for the last however many years automatically associate corsets as a physical manifestation of the oppression of women, of their enforced subservience throughout history and across society, of the general misogyny and specific chauvinism of patriarchy. Of how it grinds women down, making them smaller, making them lesser, until they disappear completely.

However. In this flick we have several scenes where Sisi is unhappy with how loosely she is strapped in to what we presume is a torturous symbolic device. She demands someone with stronger hands to come in and bind her tighter. This happens a lot.

She’s fine with the corset – the symbols of confinement and restraint that speak to her pain are elsewhere: In the horrific cages of the institutionalised women that she visits, in the continuous limits of her world, in the way she cannot do very much of anything, despite her station as Empress, and can’t even really express herself, be heard, be listened to, other than by her servants.

And yet. She is so full of life. She often has this sly look of enjoyment of life itself even when she’s chaffing under the restrictions that govern her life (slightly less) than the other women around her.

It’s hard to talk about the performance without sounding like I’m objectifying the actor or being adulatory beyond what’s on the screen. Sure, there’s plenty of dialogue, but a lot of the film, a lot of it seems that it’s just about how the empress feels at any given moment, doing the stuff that she’s allowed to do, and how she reacts to it.

Her relationship with her husband, the Emperor Franz Josef (Florian Techtmeister), is a fraught one. He resents her, for amongst other things, having convinced him to join Hungary to the empire, which apparently made everything bad everywhere; he blames her for the death of one of their daughters, being Sophie, who the empress still mourns, and he resents her finally for either being too feisty, too outspoken, or for enjoying smoking and growing older.

She resents him for… oh, lots of reasons.

I laughed when after some ‘important’ dinner, I’d already noticed that he had some mighty bushy and unkempt mutton chop whiskers. Imagine my surprise when he peals them off before complaining about her lacklustre performance in terms of entertaining. His dealings with her are generally with impatience or barely concealed irritation, but she seems to have a mixture of longing and a wish to be taken seriously, or as a whole person.

But then she also seems fixated on horseriding, on affection or desire from any other man as long as it’s not the emperor, on getting as far away from this succession of decaying palaces and summer lodgings, and on starving herself as much as possible.

It’s fairly subtle at first, and then profoundly less so, that they’re not adhering to any real notion of convincing us that this is a period piece of impeccable detail. There was a scene where the empress is fencing, and I noticed the lights, the walls, maybe even the fire extinguisher on the wall, later on some songs not on the soundtrack but being played by a performer which is pretty clearly a Rolling Stones song.

I wonder because this isn’t like Sofia Copolla’s Marie Antoinette with its Converse sneakers and contemporary jargon and deliberate anachronisms. I mean, I don’t know for sure, maybe they are less budgetary constraints and more a deliberate fucking with the audience’s perceptions?

I mean, she (the actor) displays some tattoos that I doubt the Empress shared, and yet again a lot of what happens in the film has nothing to do with biographing her actual life. And the tattoos seems to play a strange role in the way the movie ends. It’s up to us as to what to make of these deliberate and anachronistic choices, because in no way are they explained. There are entire plot lines, dramatic occasions that are complete fictions, or real terrible things that happened in her life that are completely left out. I mean, one would think the actual fate of Empress Sisi is the thing that makes her at least somewhat famous, but that’s completely changed here for an ending that wouldn’t have been out of place on a dark alternate universe version of Titanic where Rose is Empress of the World but never gets to meet Jack.

I think wondering over the historical minutiae kinda misses the point, because it’s all about the feel of it, the languid weirdness of it, how charming she is and how terrible. How she can sympathise so much with people who she didn’t need to feel anything for, and yet how selfish she is to her poor lady-in-waiting (Katharina Lorenz), how she clings to her in order to not be alone, meaning that the lady never gets to live her own life, nor a family of her own.

Such cruelty. To her kids; she seems to be devoted (to the surviving ones), but they judge her harshly, using less the words of responsible grown ups, and more the judgey tones of their father, and yet, being an Empress, she can neglect them for months at a time.

Her restlessness, which seems to prompt her to perform dramatic acts of self-harm, is perhaps less about her feelings of confinement, and, dare I say it, a level of sexual desire that she rarely seems to be able to fulfil or get satisfaction for, no matter how hard she tries with the men that are constantly letting her down.

About the only person she can rely on for that is herself, which, you know, is a testament to the idea of self-reliance.

I didn’t really get the scene where she’s prescribed heroin (a long while before it’s ever invented) and made to take it for no reason I could see, and she seems to enjoy taking it. No repercussions, no side-effects, nothing except lying down a lot, which, let’s face it, is fantastic.

Throughout, it’s just This Actor that we’re watching, being interesting despite the fact that she’s doing very little. Yet how was she making all this nothing so mesmerising? This film is two hours long but I could easily have watched a 5 hour version of this, of her just doing a bunch of mundane stuff. Maybe a crossword here, a Sudoku there. She, Vicky Krieps, is amazing.

And she spoke like 15 languages throughout the flick, not for any keen purpose, but just because. Just to show off, and, honestly, why not.

I can’t really claim to understand this strange but straightforward flick, not because I’m a guy, and not because it’s explicitly and implicitly a strong feminist take on the gilded cage (yet mythic) life of a monarch who was celebrated and abhorred in her day like the Princess Di I hope she never was in real life. It’s because not everything needs to be explicable, it can just be watched, felt and enjoyed, and I really enjoyed this flick.

8 times they don’t make ‘em like this any more, and they probably shouldn’t try, out of 10

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“Lions don’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep” – um, okay, Your Majesty - Corsage