Corsage. Not the flowers and ribbon you wore on your wrist to your end of school dance, but a type of corset worn in the nineteenth century that is especially tight. Kaiserin Elisabeth of Austria was bound into hers, the cords pulled as tight as the maid’s strength could muster, until another maid is called to tighten it further, to shrink her waist down to its infamous nineteen and a half inches. All, in this new film about her life symbolising the restraint she was living under as the wife of Austria’s Emperor Franz Joseph I.
Empress Elisabeth’s life has been told many times before from the first biopic in 1921 Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich, written by the empress’ niece; to the 1950s Sissi trilogy, that became part of the Christmas film canon in many Germanic countries; to a Netflix TV show released just last year entitled The Empress. Yet whilst there have been countless adaptations of her life in ballet, TV, film and literature, these previous works are all centred around one thing – her youth and beauty. What happens when the beloved empress starts to form lines on her forehead? When streaks of grey appear in her ankle-length hair? Corsage doesn’t tell the romantic story of a beautiful woman that becomes Empress, but the isolation of the Kaiserin, who aged forty, is losing her beauty – her only trading card.
Vicky Krieps stuns as Kaiserin Elisabeth. She captures the essence of this deeply nuanced queen who is both fiercely intelligent but incredibly frustrated. She is not always likeable: fishing for compliments to mend her damaged ego or stealing her sleepy daughter away for a midnight trip without considering her needs or young age. She is self-centred, but how else could she be when all that she has been brought up to value is her attractiveness?
She possesses endless charm and decorum when hosting guests. Switching with ease between German, Hungarian, French, and English demonstrating how she could have been the perfect diplomat. Yet in her position, she has no choice but to bedeck herself in violet and visit prisons and mental hospitals where the cameras from the other side of the bars imprison her. The lighting is often dark and dim with the cinematography making the Empress seem minute in the enormous Hofburg palace that never feels like her home. She casts a lonely figure whether trailing through the palace’s many halls or across the English countryside.
Whilst choirs sing songs of her beauty, it cannot be retrieved. Despite her stiff composure she livens up when filmed by her friend on a rudimentary film camera. This is one of many anachronistic elements creating not a documentary of the past, but a reimagined painting of it. It is complimented using modern music.
Kaiserin Elisabeth was reportedly never photographed over the age of thirty, yet the image of her created as she blazes into her fortieth year is far darker and fascinating than any previous romantic notion of her youth.
“Hofburg, Vienna, Austria” by Billy Wilson Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.