Photo: Courtesy of Film AG. A statement from IFC Films.
Over the course of her 44-year reign, Empress Elisabeth of Austria would gain a reputation for her deep melancholy and 19.5-inch waist. The second daughter of a Bavarian duke and princess, Sisi (as she liked to be called) met her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph I, when she was a teenager in the summer of 1853. Franz Joseph was supposed to marry Sisi’s older sister, but the girls were coming from a funeral when they met, and Sisi looked more beautiful in black. The couple would go on to have a bitter union: Sisi disliked the restrictions of the monarchy, and Franz Joseph found his wife childish and indulgent. But it didn’t matter that she hated public life, because he looked so good living it. “You can’t believe how lovely Sisi is when she cries,” Princess Sophia of Bavaria once wrote of her daughter-in-law.
In Austria, Sisi’s resemblance and the tradition of her disaffection is so clichéd that images of her face and her famous ankle-length hair appear on chocolates and cans of sugared violets. But in the new biopic Corsage, Austrian filmmaker Marie Kreutzer approaches Sisi’s story as a part-factual, part-fictional revisionist tale of the empress’s 1930s and 1940s. In this period, Sisi felt the beauty of her, which she had defined for so long, fade away. “It was normal for a woman, when she turned 40, to be considered an old woman. There was no discussion about that,” says Kreutzer. “But she struggled with it. She had always been seen and loved as the beautiful young empress. What would she be if she couldn’t be that anymore?
The film, which opens in theaters on December 23, stars Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps as the empress who tries to hold on to her beauty and courage while keeping her slim. She exercises rigorously and follows a punishing diet regimen of lean meats, broth, and wafer-thin sliced oranges. “Long live,” Sisi’s birthday partygoers sing to her as she bakes herself a luxurious purple cake with a bust of Sisi in the center. “Beautiful that she remains.” As the Empress blows out the candles, a woman praises her for having “the breath of a twentysomething.” Although she loves her sweets, Sisi doesn’t eat the cake, or almost anything.
Sisi hands out candied violets to patients who flatter her at a mental hospital, where less-privileged women are watched for afflictions the empath identifies with, such as melancholy and adultery. In Kreutzer’s research, she discovered that books and museums on Sisi refrain from naming her eating disorder for what she was, ironically, leaving her to be remembered as perpetually image-obsessed. “What she ate and what she didn’t eat and how little she ate is all over the biographies,” she says. “They say that she was worried about her health, which was not typical at the time.”
Krieps, who first read a biography of Sisi when she was 15 and was moved by the empress’ palpable sadness, recalls the obfuscation surrounding her eating habits. “I realized there was a reason she was obsessed with horseback riding and sport,” says Krieps, describing how people spoke of Sisi as if her body dysmorphia “was a beautiful tic of hers” that she I had.
Photo: Courtesy of Robert M. Brandstaet/All rights belong to the creator of this image. B) Robert M. Brandstaetter
The eating habits of unhappy royalty are constant cinematic fascinations. The way in which the subjects restrict themselves offers windows into the broader ways in which the corona restricts them. In Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, Princess Diana vomits pearls in a nightmarish sequence, a nod to her bulimia and her real-life rejection. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is the pinnacle of indulgence: a 14-year-old bride leaves her Austrian home for the critical eyes of Versailles, and what her marriage lacks is made up for in opulent cakes and glasses of champagne. (Sisi’s birthday cake in Corsage was baked by popular Vienna-based cake artist Sophia Stolz, who was inspired by Marie Antoinette cakes to decorate hers with old-fashioned Austrian sweets.)
Sisi’s diet walks the line between disorder and personal revolt. In a later dinner scene, he starves himself before simply getting up and leaving, giving the aristocracy his middle finger as he leaves. Kreutzer was intrigued by royal accounts of Sisi at dinner parties, where the Empress not only refused to eat but to speak to anyone. “I thought, this was really a performance,” says Kreutzer. “I have to be there but I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy your company. He wanted Corsage to be “more than a depressed, suffering empress in a gilded cage, but someone who would go against it and find a way to break free.”
While Corsage’s Sisi dreams of a custard pie, she never sees sexual desire as liberation. Her desires and her pleasures are insular and so shaped by the demand to be desirable that she herself has no time to love anyone. After seducing her riding instructor in a cabin, Sisi watches him drop to his knees and slide his fingers up her thighs before asking if she thinks she’s beautiful. “You’re the fucking sun,” she replies, taken aback when she realizes they won’t consummate the flirtation. All she wanted was to be wanted: “I love watching you looking at me,” she says, then masturbates in a bathtub.
Photo: Courtesy of Felix Vratny. An IFC film.
Sisi’s real life ended in tragedy: her son died in a murder-suicide with his lover, and she was murdered by an Italian anarchist. Corsage revisits that story in the last half of it weaving together moments of pure edible delight. In a pivotal scene, Sisi’s sweet cousin, Ludwig II of Bavaria, pours thick chocolate down her throat (“I almost suffocated,” says Krieps, who finished eating it after the cameras stopped rolling), and the pleasure He opens it. to new possibilities. In a fantasy sequence, Sisi stops starving herself and consumes what she pleases, but slowly disappears from public life, creating a doppelgänger out of a maiden who wears a face veil and takes Sisi’s place in the events while the real Sisi eats chocolates in bed. she, she injects heroin and relaxes with her dalmatians.
Eventually, Sisi makes her replacement permanent, jumping to her death in an oddly joyous scene. If she couldn’t be seen and loved as the beautiful young empress, why be seen at all? Anyway, the image of the real Sisi died at the age of 40. The Empress refused to be photographed or painted in her later years and wore veils during public appearances. “I read a lot of crime fiction, and when you read that someone hasn’t been seen for over 20 years, you think, how do we know it’s her?” Kreutzer says. “That’s how I got the idea that she ran away from her life. I thought it would be important for her to take control of her and create that ending herself.”
Source: news.google.com