A silver spoon clunks loudly inside a bowl of beef broth. The meal — well, barely a meal — is served to Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) twice a day, her diet a strict combination of insipid soup and wafer-thin slices of lemon. The sacrifice is reflected in the ever-shrinking measures of her tightly constrained waste, almost permanently held by a structured corsage pulled with painful might by small-handed maids hired for this very specific task.
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Sissi, as the Empress is lovingly called, turns idleness into obsession. If her life is doomed to be defined by the painstaking triviality of the superficial, she might as well lean into it. If rumors are to be spread about her every move, why not reap the benefits of their lurid nature? If subjects are to comment on every aspect of her appearance, hell, she will give them a reason to do so. The aristocrat’s struggle with conformity and penchant for controversy is at the center of Marie Kreutzer’s period drama “Corsage,” part of the official selection of the prestigious Un Certain Regard strand of the Cannes Film Festival.
The year is 1877, and Sissi is turning 40, the average life expectancy of a common woman at the time, as pointedly remarked by a concerned doctor. Greatly known for her vanity — a natural byproduct of her undeniable beauty — the Empress wrestles with the idea of old age, stranded somewhere between the reckless naïvete of youth and the debilitating despondence of maturity. If Emperor Franz Joseph I fills his days with the gravely important affairs of powerful men, Sissi aimlessly wanders the ample yet lifeless rooms of their classic manor, stepping up and down the scale in compulsive exasperation and sitting for hours as her notorious long hair gets carefully braided by a maid. When restlessness kicks in, the woman packs her bags and travels to one of the family’s many getaways across Europe.
The camera lingers on Krieps’ mischievous smirk as Sissi blatantly ignores the stiff unspoken rules of convention. When night comes, markedly ceasing the frivolous get-togethers of aristocrats who thrive on polite disdain, the Empress sits by candlelight, summoning anyone who can offer her a quick fix of adulation. “I love looking at you looking at me,” she tells her besotted horse-riding trainer. It is through the adoring eyes of others that the ruler is reminded of her singular existence within a system built to erase her through mandatory uniformity. Painfully aware of how imposed obsolescence is cursed to shrink her sharp brain, Elisabeth desperately looks for comfort in the constant reinforcement of her most precious social commodity: her appearance.
When in need of nurturing something other than her own vanity — and to reassure herself of her mental competencies — Sissi heads to the local asylum, parading through the corridors with a basket of gifts and big curious eyes. Purple is her ruffled dress, the candied violets she eagerly distributes and the cigarettes she takes long puffs from. Purple, a royalist color, stands for the rebellion she can’t contain, the desire to disrupt, to be seen as more than mere decoration.
Krieps excels in this exacerbated exercise of self-aggrandizing conducted not through frantic arrogance but measured torpor. The “Phantom Thread” star navigates the mental anguish caused by cramping societal expectations without ever pandering to the mawkish, as mesmerizing in her rendering of despair as riotous in moments of decadent grandeur. In what might be her best performance yet, the actress waltzes naked in the lake in the middle of the night and exaggeratedly gurgles to melted chocolate being poured down her throat, fully in command of her craft. Her voice is quiet yet filled with angst, her wrists pounding on the table when punctuating a whisper. Her body, disfigured by haunting mania, is also her single source of pleasure, the same hands that push away plates of food roaming pale skin until they reach an anxious climax.
Echoing the melancholy of Pablo Larraín’s recent royal affair “Spencer,” the glamorous lust of Yorgos Lanthimos’ raunchy “The Favourite” and the visual opulence of Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” Kreutzer’s rendition of one of history’s most tragic tales is an inspired addition to period films dedicated to complex women. “They claim to be objective, but they are never objective,” says Sissi of photographs, and “Corsage” succeeds precisely by ditching the myth of objectivity in favor of portraying a woman eternalized by the glory and dolor of her imperfections. [B+]
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