Corsage (Marie Kreutzer, 2022)

Corsage is eminently watchable, but the fact it's being considered one of the year's major achievements is frankly mind-boggling.

As others have already mentioned, Corsage seems to owe quite a lot to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette which, like it or not, was a very innovative approach to the historical biopic. I personally liked Marie Antoinette, seeing it as an irreverent, punk-rock take on Peter Watkins' method, combining the Brechtian distance of anachronism with a WGAF? attitude that comes close to undermining its entire project. By comparison, Corsage, to strain a metaphor, wants to let them have cake and let them eat it too.

In many respects, Kreutzer adheres to the expected approach in dramatizing the late life of Empress Elizabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) and her increasing dissatisfaction with the confines of the Habsburg monarchy. The film begins shortly before her 40th birthday, and we can see that, along with her unwillingness to play along with the symbolic role assigned to a queen, she has reached an emotional impasse in her marriage to Kaiser Franz Josef (Florian Teichtmeister). It's clear that love was there once, but their conflicting roles in the court have driven them apart.

If we consider Corsage formally, Kreutzer follows a linear timeline in terms of Sisi's life, deciding to stop well short of her 1898 assassination. But the director continually introduces strange, seemingly random anachronistic elements, like a harpist performing "As Tears Go By," or, in the most awkward intrusion, Sisi encountering the cinematograph about fifteen years ahead of schedule. On the one hand, these temporal disruptions are more dramatic than Coppola's, which were mostly non-diegetic. (No one in Marie Antoinette remarks on the queen's Chuck Taylors.) But on the other hand, there is no real logic to the way these ruptures are deployed. 

It is possible that Kreutzer means to suggest that Sisi is herself a force of temporal rupture, that her presence in various situations thrusts them into an unexpected modernity. This is a heady concept, and one that would require great filmmaking skill to properly articulate. But what Corsage offers instead is confusion, a muddled set of formal gestures that imply some broader meaning but fail to coalesce. Kreutzer presumes that Krieps' characterization of Sisi is forceful enough to convey not only emotional dislocation, but a fatal rift in the space-time continuum.

This is not the case. Although there is nothing really wrong with Krieps' performance, it just as often suggests melancholia or petulance as defiance. Corsage so deliberately walks the path trod by Marie Antoinette as well as the much less successful Spencer. And yet it is centered on a woman whose dominant personality trait, as laid out by the film anyway, is vanity. Sisi may be experiencing confinement on a number of layers, but Corsage's controlling metaphor is the corset which, as Sisi's body ages, she demands to be laced tighter and tighter. 

If this is meant to suggest a self-destructive attempt at control, along the lines of anorexia -- "I am seen only as a body, so I will reduce myself to that body until it kills me" -- that reading is undermined by Sisi's fixation on youth and beauty elsewhere in the film. Her affair with the horse trainer Bay (Colin Morgan) is largely predicated on the way he looks at her, and even her third-act scissor-attack on her tresses (what a thudding cliche) has less to do with fighting against superficial appearance than it does punishing those who are charged with maintaining it. When her hairdresser (Alma Hasun) looks at the hair on the floor and weeps over the destruction of her "life's work," it is one of the film's genuinely affecting moments.

As Kreutzer seems to run out of ideas toward the end of the film, she places greater emphasis on Sisi's "squad," the group of women whose God-given role it is to orbit around her. Lower ladies of the court, such as Ida (Jeanne Werner), or Sisi's biographer, Marie Festetics (Katharina Lorenz) are presented like "Sex and the City" girls, providing support and intimacy for their "Carrie." This is  hypocritical, of course. They have little choice in the matter. But it also speaks to Corsage's scattershot approach to narrative construction. We only understand these characters in relation to Sisi, and now, as if by fiat, that functional connection is meant to be soulful and feminist.

Perhaps Corsage's most compelling subplot is the one to which Kreutzer pays the least attention. Sisi's relationship with her young daughter Valerie (Rosa Hajjaj) is highly complex and fraught. It's not just that Sisi is too self-involved to be a proper mother to Valerie, although there is that. As Valerie matures, she is more and more committed to the pomp and pageantry her mother explicitly disdains. In another potent scene, Valerie gives Sisi a crayon drawing of a day when she thought she looked most beautiful and proper. This gesture cuts both ways, and strongly suggests that if Corsage had stayed small, and focused on the familial micro-aggressions of Habsburg life, it might have better accomplished its larger goals.