Film Review: "Corsage" (2022)

The new biopic explores the contradictions of a royal life lived in front of the eyes of the world.

Note: Some spoilers for the film follow.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria, popularly known as Sisi, seems to be having a bit of a moment in our current popular culture. She is the subject of both a very popular Netflix series–The Empress–as well as a feature film, Corsage, in which she is portrayed by Vicky Krieps, perhaps best known for her unsettlingly charismatic performance in Phantom Thread, who plays Sisi as a woman increasingly stifled by the Austrian royal court. Though she has much to say about the ruling of the realm, her husband insists that she fulfill her primary purpose as a royal wife: namely, being seen and not heard. This doesn’t sit well with the empress, a woman who has a keen mind and interest in affairs of state, and she yearns to be something more than just a symbol. As the film slowly unwinds, she constantly tries to assert her own independence, with decidedly mixed results. 

From the very beginning, Krieps gives us a woman who is a true bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, she is a warm and loving mother. Yes, she may grow impatient with her children–both her son, the presumed heir to the throne, and her youngest daughter, whom she clearly adores, have inherited more than a little of their father’s priggishness–but she is openly affectionate toward them. On the other hand, she also leaves them behind for long periods of time, as she journeys throughout Europe trying, and never quite succeeding, in finding the person who can make her feel whole and complete. 

More than anything else, Elisabeth yearns to be seen, but not in the sterile, judging way that is the fate of all of those who wear a crown. Instead, she wants those in her life to look past her glittering facade, the crowns and the jewels and the accouterments of royalty, and see her for what she is. While her female companions seem to be able to accomplish this, the same cannot be said of any of them men her life, certainly not her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph I. While kindly enough in his way, he is far too committed to matters of state to give her the type of attention she so clearly needs. Even their lovemaking is perfunctory and far from satisfying to either party. 

And yet, even in Elisabeth’s desire to be seen there is a paradox, for even as she makes a spectacle of herself with her various dalliances and public displays, she also does everything she can to become invisible. Most notably, she demands that her maids cinch her tighter and tighter in the corsage of the title, and she engages in a rigorous training regime designed to make her already slender form even more so. As the film proceeds, she also withdraws behind the comforting anonymity provided by a veil, the better to hide herself from the scrutiny of both her subjects and the gossip-mongering members of the nobility. 

It’s therefore all the more striking that she seems to find a peculiar form of liberation in the form of the moving image. During a visit to Britain, she meets a rather dashing and enchanting young man, who asks for permission to film her. Though rather bemused at first, she ultimately agrees, and there follow several moments where the enigmatic and notoriously camera-shy Sisi seems to revel in the very idea that her visage might be captured and rendered immortal. 

In some strange way, this seems to give her a measure of the freedom that she can attain in no other arena of her life. In one of the film’s more fascinating scenes, we see her posing for an official portrait, and it’s clear from everything about her–from her body language to the contempt written on her face–that she sees this particular bit of iconography as just another stifling piece of royal pageantry. Unlike the home movies, the royal portrait is intended to fix her in place, to render her into something that others can ogle and contemplate. Indeed, one of the last glimpses we get of her is her dancing off into the distance even as, in the present, she leaps off of her royal yacht into the welcoming embrace of the sea. 

It’s to Krieps’ credit that she manages to keep all of these various aspects of Elisabeth’s personality, her desire for seclusion and her yearning to be seen, her desire for freedom and her yearning  in a delicate balance. As she did in Phantom Thread, she imbues her character with an unorthodox form of charisma, one that is as unsettling and enigmatic as it is engaging. Thus, even as she opens herself up to us, she also keeps something back, and we’re never quite sure just where we stand with this empress. Are we witnessing something of the true her, or is this just another performance put on for our benefit? 

To my mind, Corsage has a great deal in common with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, with a bit of the otherworldly and offbeat sense of humor of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite. When, toward the end of Corsage, it becomes clear that Sisi is willing to truly take great measures to free herself from the existence she has led so far, the film begins to become something of an elegy for an Elisabeth-that-might-have-been. Rather than being gunned down by an Italian anarchist, she instead convinces one of her ladies-in-waiting to take on her identity and, freed at last, dives into the ocean. Does she survive? Is there, perhaps, a small boat waiting to take her into a life of anonymity, far away from the prison of royal life? The film doesn’t offer us any answers to these questions and, given Elisabeth’s own yearning for privacy and freedom, this seems quite fitting.  

All in all, Corsage is a brilliant film, as it manages to both obey the traditional rules of the period drama and the biopic while also subverting them. Certainly, much of this balancing act must be attributed to Krieps’ inspired performance, but director Marie Kreutzer also deserves a great deal of the credit. Altogether, the film is an extraordinary portrait of one of the 19th century’s most fascinating and enigmatic royals.