Corsage

The memory of ‘Sissi’, Habsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria, long ago morphed into kitsch memorabilia across Europe. With Corsage, actress Vicky Krieps rips up all the tweeness and starts again. Krieps proposed this revisionist film to director Marie Kreutzer, and here Krieps portrays Sissi with 2022-style diffidence, replacing a sappy legend with vibrant nowness. As Sissi moves across Europe, bored and searching, she pines for independence, and Leeds film pioneer Louis Le Prince is a sometime interloper. Winner of the Un Certain Regard Best Performance award at Cannes 2022.

The idea occurred to me as I’d seen Romy Schneider in the ‘Sissi’ films at our neighbor’s place when I was 15 and read Empress Elisabeth’s biography pretty much in parallel. As a teenager, I had all kinds of questions when I finished the book. Why did Empress Elisabeth have fitness equipment built for her? Why did she refuse to be painted after she was 40? I told Marie [Kreutzer, director] all that and she didn’t say a word at first. But then something amazing happened …I opened my mailbox and there was an envelope with the finished script. Marie had just added a note saying something like: ‘I went back to the archives. You were right’. That was so classy.

Actress Vicky Krieps