Pit was all my life Princess Sisi had been sort of Letizia of Spain or contemporary Kate Middleton. A royal admired for her looks and, above all, an “ambassador” of the Austro-Hungarian Crown after her lavish marriage to Franz Joseph of Austria, in Vienna in April 1854 (she was just 16 years old). She visited hospitals and churches full of adoring wounded soldiers and she shrank, if she could, from the social life of the Austrian court, not particularly fond of worldliness.
She was beautiful. This yes. And she knew she was. She was admired by courts all over Europe. So much so that he felt compelled to feed this vanity over time with rituals and treatments bordering on fanaticism: the chronicles of the time tell of immersions in tubs full of olive oil to keep the skin white, or of ice water baths to stop the time machine or, again, of drinks made from six egg whites with salt to eat.
Vicky Krieps, the leading actress of the movie “The Empress’s Corset”
Princess Sissi’s hair weighed five kilos
And then endless sessions to arrange her very long hair (weighed five kilos) which he treated with the famous “crème Celeste”, a mix of white wax, almond oil and rose water. She was 1.72 meters tall and weighed 45 kilos. And she was famous, as any influencer or supermodel might be today, for her 50cm wasp waist, as can be seen in the poetic portraits painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.
At the time, the newspapers wondered how the empress managed to preserve her “radiant complexion”, while the ladies of the aristocracy copied her “crown” hairstyle, with large braids gathered above the nape of the neck. Just like now you copy the outfits of a Maxima of Holland or a Rania of Jordan. The obsession with weight Actually behind this glamorous image now also described in the very popular Netflix series, the empress, which traces his youthful years in six episodes with newcomers Devrim Lingnau and Philip Froissant, there was one paranoid obsession: weight.
He stepped on the scale every day
A scene from the film “The Empress’s Corset”
Every morning Princess Sissi climbed onto the scales and measured the extra grams coming to eat even just two orange wedges in order not to alter its iconic silhouette. The objective was only one and painful: to slip into the corset. Tool of beauty and control at the same time. And then, in the end, of liberation when he decides not to let himself be squeezed for over an hour by the maids who pulled the strings.
He tells it now an intriguing film to be released on December 7, Corsage (The corset of the empress), of the Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, already awarded in Cannes in the section A certain Regard for Best Performance (Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krieps, lead role) and in the running for Austria as best foreign film at the Oscars.
Princess Sissi in the film is forty years old
The film, which starts from 1877, i.e. from his fortieth birthday, offers an upside down and tremendously contemporary point of view on Elisabetta Amalia Eugenia of Wittelsbach, as she was called at the registry office. It’s not the sugary and at times (un)happy Sissi portrayed in an idyllic way in the 50s by a candid Romy Schneider in the famous trilogy by Ernst Marischka, but she is now a tired empress, with a complex, gothic and melancholy personality, who decides to rebel against the system after a life of duties and mourning (she will never recover from the death of her eldest daughter Sofia, who died of pneumonia at the age of two, and then from the suicide of her only son, heir to the throne, Rodolfo).
1950. Romy Schineider and Karlheinz Böhm in the film “Sissi, The Young Empress” (Photo by FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images)
He used his body to express himself
And it does it, again, the only way it knows how: through the body. So she starts smoking at the table, eats, injects heroin to calm her nerves – as the doctor suggests – and begins to disappear from public life. Travel, flirt with Count Andrássy, the great love, and with his cousin Ludwig II of Bavaria (who will die under mysterious circumstances and inspire the Ludwig by Luchino Visconti in 1973). And he decides not to be portrayed anymore, asking the court artists to use the images of his youth.
He was replaced by a double
In rare appearances, he hides behind a thick black veil and, when possible, is replaced by a double. a lady of the court forced to strict diets to put on the corset. He does what he wants, basically. Being resumed by her two surviving children: Maria Valeria, her youngest, she almost seems to be her mother. «At forty a person dissolves» she confesses, increasingly impatient, to the artist who is filming it for the last time.
From the movie “The Empress’s Corset”
He rebelled against the system
The rebellion against the system The themes are all there: advancing age, eating disorders, depression and the awareness of being a person with needs and desires and more, as her husband Francesco Giuseppe will tell her at one point, amazed in front of her provocative attitudes, «a woman must only be beautiful and give birth to an heir to the throne».
The corset then becomes the very emblem of a constraint from which she frees herself with maturity. The leading actress, the thirty-nine-year-old Vicky Krieps, however, acted with the corset for the entire time of filming to give authenticity to her protagonist (“You can’t breathe, the solar plexus is blocked,” she said, emphasizing that she had and mood changes for distress).
Sissi was… feminist?
From the movie “The Empress’s Corset”
It is a feminist film, in some ways, which is opposed to the strongly patricentric idea of the society of the time. But, after all, has anything changed? «She was a woman who wanted more for herself. At the time she was considered “old” at this age. She sissi takes the opportunity to change the narrative about herself. And this was also my starting point» explains the director. “When you can no longer be young and beautiful, what do you become, who are you?”
The research of director Marie Kreutzer
Marie Kreutzer documented herself for a long time before starting production by studying and reading most of the historical biographies on the empress who, as is known, she will be killed in Geneva by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni on 10 September 1898. «I’m Viennese and for me Sissi has always been just a souvenir, like Mozart, a simple tourist attraction. IS it was Vicky Krieps who proposed me a film about her. We had already worked together and it seemed to me a singular proposal».
Devrim Lingnau and Philip Froissant as Elizabeth “Sissi” and Franz Joseph in the Netflix series “The Empress”. (Thomas Schenke / Netflix)
Celebrity culture
“Then the idea gradually caught on. I thought it might be interesting to depict her at this stage of life, when it began to move away from Vienna, to become more erratic. And then I was fascinated by her judgments on her mysterious, difficult and fragile personality. Maybe today she would be diagnosed with depression and anorexia nervosa. At the time his illness was called “melancholy”». Sad princess like Lady Diana In some ways Sissi, if you will, was one of the first victims of what is today we call “celebrity culture” ending up like an animal in a cage».
“The Empress” Netflix series, Devrim Lingnau (Thomas Schenk/Netflix)
Like Lady Diana
And our thoughts immediately turn to another contemporary icon, Lady Diana, very young engaged to Prince Charles and tragically disappeared like the empressAnd. She was almost the forerunner ante litteram, if you think about it. « Yes, there are many parallels with the Princess of Wales. Moreover, historically, it seems that in England Sissi loved to stay in a residence of the Spencers».
She was a skilled horsewoman
«The fact is that when you are a public figure, a “royal”, you have no room for manoeuvre, you can do little, you are full of limits, but at the same time you have to maintain the image that people have of you. I read an article about Sissi in which journalists at the time commented on her weight. As if she was just that. She was something else: she knew how to fence, she was a skilled horsewoman, she had had equipped gyms installed in her residences. She was modern, she was forward, but she was not understood ».
Princess Sissi in 1846 (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)[KaiserinElisabethGemaelde[KaiserinElisabethGemaelde
Princess Sissi was critical of the monarchy
Nothing of her historical present seemed to belong to her. «I act like Ulysses, because the waves attract me, I’m a seagull without land, there is no place I can call home. I fly, from wave to wave” Sissi will write in one of the poems. She adored the poet Heinrich Heine, many of her letters and reflections remain. She will leave a poetic diary composed between 1885 and 1888 which she has sealed for “future souls” (it can only be read fifty years later). She was critical of the monarchy, perhaps already attracted to republican ideas.
He dies at sixty
“But she could do nothing but exercise power over herself” underlines again Marie Kreutzer who of course also saw Romy Schneider’s Sissi. “I didn’t find the woman I studied there. But I think that film was a product of the time, a story to make people dream after the war». When she is stabbed to death, Sissi gets up, almost in a last breath towards the life she had not loved. She was only sixty.
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