CORSAGE
| 2022 – 113′ – Drama, Biopic
Written by Marie Kreutzer.
Directed by Marie Kreutzer.
Starring Vicky Krieps, Florian Teichtmeister, Katharina Lorenz, Jeanne Werner, Finnegan Oldfield, Colin Morgan, Alma Hasun.
Official selection: Cannes International Film Festival 2022, The American French Film Festival 2022.
In French with English subtitles.
A IFC Films release.|
Vicky Krieps is nothing short of breathtaking in Marie Kreutzer‘s scintillating period piece, CORSAGE. In fact, it was at her behest that the director even considered making a film about Empress Elisabeth of Austria — whose life has already been immortalized in a trilogy of kitschy 1950s “Sissi” movies, starring Romy Schneider, which are practically cult films in France. Those baubles couldn’t be further from this sublime opus, which portrays the young empress with a hunger for knowledge and a zest for life in the face of suffocating conventions. This fictional account of her later years, peppered with bold stylistic and historical anachronisms, begins on Christmas Eve of 1877, as Elisabeth turns 40. Once idolized for her great beauty, she is now officially deemed an old hag, and launches into a draconian regimen of starvation diets, grueling gymnastics, meticulous hair styling and, most importantly, daily measurements of her waist, cinching her whalebone corsetry tighter and tighter to ensure that her bodice — or corsage in French —is so tiny that it may one day disappear.