UPrincess Sissi had never been seen like this before. In Corsagepresented with great applause in the section Un Certain Regard of the Cannes Film Festival the Empress Elisabeth of Austria is pounding, full of character; a free spirit, irreverent and restless (in some respects, a proto-Lady Diana), heavy smoker, obsessed with weight, prone to experimentation (including opium), predisposed to flirting and linked by an ambiguous relationship to her cousin Ludwig of Bavaria … beating her fists on the table (not metaphorically) with her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph and beating him in a foil duel.
The credit for such an unconventional portrait goes to Vicky Krieps, one of the best actresses seen on the Croisette (it is also in Plus que jamaisthe last film made by Gaspard Ulliel before his death). And the credit goes to her not only for the interpretation …
Vicky Krieps as Princess Sissi in “Corsage” (photo Felix Vratny).
Disturbing music
“It was Vicky who asked me to make a film about Elizabeth (she’s never called Sissi on the screen, ed) »Says the director, the Austrian Marie Kreutzer. “I laughed and replied: why? Little by little, however, the idea grew in me like a seed, and I decided to dive into biographies and look for what would resonate within me ». Granting herself many artistic licenses: sensational is the scene in which the empress gets up from an official banquet by raising her middle finger, the ending completely anti-historical. Let’s not spoil, rest assured: Corsage – corset, which the Elisabetta in the film – terrified of being put on weight – expects tighter and tighter – will arrive in Italian cinemas in the autumn.
Let’s just add that the story is centered in the months around the sovereign’s fortieth birthday, in 1877, frightened by the thought of growing old (luckily there is the court doctor who, showing great tact, tells her that at her age many are already dead…). But she’s not a one dimensional woman, she’s not a heroine: I’m on my way! she be capricious and cruel. The music of the French singer-songwriter Camille is perfect, creating an alienating effect as it already happened thanks to the soundtrack in the Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola.
Vicky Krieps with director Marie Kreutzer (Getty Images).
Discover Princess Sissi at the museum
You leave the cinema with a curiosity: who was the real Sissi? A great way to find out is a visit to the Sisi (as the Austrians call it) Museum in Vienna, set up in 2004 – with striking ideas – by the set designer Rolf Langenfass. Surprising about her already from her antechamber: from newspaper clippings of the time it turns out that she is rarely spoken of, unlike her husband, much loved by her subjects. When she was killed at the age of 61 by an anarchist, the general emotion was for the emperor, for his harsh mourning.
But it is strangely death that marks the turning point: we begin to exploit the character by creating commemorative coins and souvenir objects, monuments are built in the places where he stayed. Cinema gives the greatest (and most false) impulse: Elisabetta has been the protagonist of films since 1928, although her figure is imprinted in the collective memory by the trilogy by Ernst Marishka, played by the very young Romy Schneider (whose forty-year anniversary of her disappearance, moreover, on May 29).
An unsurpassable mourning
In the following rooms, his life is rigorously documented. TO starting from birth (December 24, 1837) and childhood in Bavaria, in the midst of nature, free from aristocratic conformisms, although the mother is the sister of the emperor’s mother. And it was the two women who decided to marry Francesco Giuseppe Elena, Sissi’s older sister. Too bad that he, given the fifteen year old Elisabetta, changed their plan … (if it reminds you of the story of Diana and her sister, you are right). In a few years the young woman will give birth to four children (in the film she has three): Marie Sophie (who will die a few months, a bereavement from which she has never recovered according to the vision of Kreutzer and of Corsage), Gisela, Rodolfo and Marie Valerie.
One would never finish writing about her, who wrote about herself in the third person – in poetic diaries that have remained – things that intrigue even more: “In this world where no one understands her, / where a hundred thousand prying eyes surround her / and curious whisper: “Look at her, the madwoman, look at her” ». Modest proposal: why not entrust Marie Kreutzer and the essential Vicky Krieps (who hasn’t made a mistake since becoming internationally noticed – in 2017, alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in The hidden thread) an author TV series? There is material for many episodes …
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