Don’t let the title fool you. “Corsage,” Marie Kreutzer’s intriguingly revisionist – if dramatically inert – portrait of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, isn’t remotely flowery, flouncy or romantic. Instead, what in English means a form of floral adornment in French means the bodice of a dress; for Kreutzer and her star, Vicky Krieps, it means “corset,” and all of the sacrifice, constriction and social inhibition the term implies.

Transpiring over the course of a year beginning in late 1877, during which Elisabeth turns 40, “Corsage” isn’t a portrait of a lady on fire, exactly, but smoldering just the same. Long admired for her beauty, preternaturally slim figure and elaborate hairstyles, Elisabeth is facing the unwelcome reality that her currency is now in free fall. As Margo Channing famously declared in “All About Eve” when faced with the same truths about women and aging: “I. Hate. Men.” The injustice extends to Elisabeth’s declining political power: Although her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister) has cemented the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he routinely dismisses her attempts to advise him on policy issues. Still adored and obsessively scrutinized by her subjects, she channels her ambitions through good works at local hospitals and mental institutions, and escapes the boredom of her ceremonial duties by fainting (or pretending to) and traveling extensively through Europe, pointedly without her husband or children.

Kreutzer and Krieps lend “Corsage” an air of carefully constructed artifice. As in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” to which this film will inevitably be compared, the filmmakers never miss an opportunity to inject a creative anachronism, whether it be an errant modern-day farm tractor or mop pail or a harpist singing a courtly rendition of “As Tears Go By.” Krieps plays Elisabeth as a woman of proto-feminist frustration, fed up with being judged by her looked-at-ness but also wholly dependent on it. She steals glances at the camera, as if to ask the audience, “Can you believe what I have to endure?” At one point, she literally gives the finger to an aristocratic gathering at the palace.

Thematically, then, “Corsage” is familiar in its depiction of a smart, self-aware woman trapped within the confines of privilege, as anyone familiar with the latest tranche of Princess Diana stories will instantly recognize and begin to hum along to. Dramatically, though, Kreutzer’s increasingly ahistoric retelling starts to feel inert, as enervated and suffused with ennui as its world-weary heroine.

“Corsage” benefits from an exceedingly handsome production, filmed with burnished elegance by cinematographer Judith Kaufmann. But its episodic structure, which leads to a bizarre speculation regarding Elisabeth’s ultimate fate, loses interest even as it gains a certain masochistic momentum. What’s more, Kreutzer and Krieps seem to buy into a tired conceit whereby self-annihilation becomes a trope for liberation and, heaven help us, “agency.” Still, for all its attractively appointed torpor, “Corsage” offers a provocative retort to the fetishistic depictions of Elisabeth that have become commodified in Austria over the past 125 years. It tears open the candy box to reveal something poisonous at its center.

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

‘Glass Onion’ another fun, and scathing, ‘Knives Out’ mystery

Next »

‘The Pale Blue Eye’ a 19th-century whodunit – with Edgar Allan Poe