Corsage

A daughter of a Bavarian duke happens into the halls of the highest royalty of Austria, catches the eye of the emperor (who is supposed to marry her older sister), and becomes an empress. Such are the broad strokes of Elisabeth Eugenie’s fairy-tale origin story (she also loved horses, another mark on the princess fantasy checklist). And this fairy tale has endured. Empress Elisabeth remains a beloved European cultural icon; her 1854 marriage to Franz Joseph in Vienna at age 16 and subsequent reign have inspired music, ballet, and depictions on screens large and small: A trio of films from the Fifties starring Romy Schneider are seasonal classics, while Netflix aired its German series The Empress last year, a soapy take on the romantic intrigues at Schönbrunn Palace. Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer (The Ground Beneath My Feet) has her own tale to tell of Empress Elisabeth (Krieps) in Corsage, and it’s about as far from a bodice ripper as the title implies.

It is also, at times, far from the facts. The film is more of a fictional reimagining, and as Corsage begins, Elisabeth is about to celebrate her 40th birthday. That would be 1877, the height of the Victorian era, when societal options for women were particularly limited, and Kreutzer has no shortage of material here to present the cruelties of the time: the suffocatingly constrained clothing, of course, the barely-there diet of beef broth and razor-thin orange slices, the repeated edict given to merely be a presence rather than a voice in national affairs. As the newspapers and gentry gossip endlessly over her figure, a middle-aged Elisabeth is pretty much over it. Simmering anger and self-destructive urges now occupy Elisabeth, much to the chagrin of Franz Joseph (Teichtmeister). After ruining yet another state dinner with her unpredictable insolence, Elisabeth spends most of the film abroad, wanderlusting around England and Hungary with her lady-in-waiting Marie (Lorenz) and her trusted entourage.

Corsage has many things going for it, most of them being the virtuoso performance from Vicky Krieps. She imbues Elisabeth with a restlessness that comes off her in waves, and as her fury percolates, so too does her shrewdness. And so would the dramatic tension, but Kreutzer wields metaphors so bluntly that any emotional poignancy quickly evaporates. Elisabeth repeatedly visits a woman chained to a bed in an insane asylum, a kindred stifled spirit. A fencing match breaks out into a heated argument (they’re still fencing, but with words!). And in what is perhaps the worst offense a period film can commit in the name of irony, Elisabeth’s royal physician prescribes her heroin, referring to it as “absolutely harmless.” A classic, that one. While the real Elisabeth died from an assassination attempt in Switzerland – a sharpened file in the hands of an Italian anarchist pierced her heart – Kreutzer opts for a different ending for the empress, one that affords her the agency the world denied her. Corsage might right that wrong, but its leaden handling of the material sinks just about everything else going for it.