CORSAGE
One can’t help but hold one’s breath – almost to the point of passing out! – while watching Vicky Krieps getting laced into impossibly rigid leather corsets. It’s not what you think.
In Marie Kreutzer’s innovative historical drama, the Phantom Thread star plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the beloved 19th-century monarch whose 1898 assassination – an event transmogrified by Kreutzer’s script – was part of an escalating sequence that led to the first World War.
With Corsage, we don’t get as far as the ballet-inspiring 1889 murder-suicide of her only son and his lover at Mayerling, or her 44 years on the throne: we instead get a very gilded cage.
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Fast approaching 40, an age that, as her physician reminds her, is already above the average life expectancy among her woman subjects, the empress goes to extraordinary lengths to maintain her figure and youthful looks.
Many moments in Corsage are gleefully anachronistic: a stable hand plays Help Me Make It Through The Night on the ukulele, electric lighting illuminates the dining hall, a rude finger gesture is made in the direction of the Hungarian statesman Gyula Andrássy and the emperor.
The punishing diet and exercise regime favoured by Elisabeth in the movie – gymnastics, fencing, horse riding, meals consisting of a thin slice of orange – are historically accurate.
In a life that is as constricting as its torturous undergarments, keeping her weight under 50kg was one of the only areas over which Elisabeth – or Sissy as she was known – had any control.
“Your duty is to merely represent,” her husband insists. Her attempts to discuss Sarajevo at the dinner table meet disapproval and anger. A tour around the wards of a mental asylum mirrors the actions of a more recent famously stifled princess.
Corsage shares some obvious DNA with Pablo Larraín’s Spencer and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, but where those films swoon for their put-upon heroines, Krieps brings an unapologetic flintiness. Kreutzer’s inventive fifth feature is complemented by the cinematographer Judith Kaufman’s original high-angled dinner tables and low-angled horses.
Take that, The Crown.
