Corsage (Marie Kreutzer, 2022)

[DarkImbecile]

Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage

[Altair]

I had been looking forward to seeing Marie Kreutzer's Corsage ever since reading the reviews coming out of Cannes: an anachronistic biopic of Empress Sissi of Austria-Hungary, wife of Emperor Franz Josef, with the phenomenal Vicky Krieps starring. I had anticipated something playful and inventive and there are a few moments which work - 'As Tears Go By' being played on a harp outside at night, the wild dance sequence over the credits, but unlike the clever use of anachronism in Marie Antoinette or The Favourite, here it seems disjointed.

Ostensibly set in 1878-79, Kreutzer includes film cameras, telephones in the background, tractors, the odd plug-socket, which simultaneously makes it feel like it's set in the early 1900s and distances us from the narrative. Worse, it means that the specificity of Sissi's life is lost: she becomes an archetype in Kreutzer's vision of petty, domestic female oppression. She's uninterested in the ways Sissi actually navigated her position or the complex political environment she inhabited (that climaxed in reality in her assassination in 1898 by an Italian anarchist). Krieps is very good, but there's a fundamental lack of narrative tension: fairly self-contained episodes pass by, some more interesting than others (one standout is when she cuts her hair), others fairly predicatable (an aborted affair with a horse riding instructor). If you're going to invent, take that as an invitation to be more interesting than this.

While The Favourite used historical invention and anachronism to intensify its narrative, here Kreutzer is merely content to catalogue the restrictions on Sissi's life. The problem is, Sissi is characterised as arrogant, classist, juvenile at times, selfish, and uncharismatic. Maybe accurate, or a necessary de-glamourisation of this legendary figure in Austrian culture, but over two hours we feel distanced from her emotionally. Kreutzer's filmmaking is most eloquent in all the scenes of her being tied up or untied from her corset by her ladies-in-waiting, a straightforward metaphor rooted in cultural specificity. The scenes of heroine-use however, are misjudged and go nowhere.

This brings me to the ending, the most flawed part of the film:

SpoilerShow

Sissi's suicide, by jumping from a ship in the Mediterranean, while breathtakingly filmed, is a frustrating narrative get-out. Kreutzer painted herself into a corner with a slack narrative of martial and social ennui, and so ends it with suicide, neither delving deep into what such an act means, nor affecting the audience, because it operates so blatently as a way of ending the film.

Judith Kaufmann's 35mm cinematography is incredible and the use of locations across Germany and Austria inventive and well-staged (Kreutzer really handles cinematic space shot-to-shot very well), but the film amounts to a frustrating misfire. So much potential, so many ideas, a great lead actress, and yet she can't weave a compelling narrative out of it.

[yoshimori]

Ostensibly set in 1878-79, Kreutzer includes film cameras, telephones in the background, tractors, the odd plug-socket, which simultaneously makes it feel like it's set in the early 1900s and distances us from the narrative. Worse, it means that the specificity of Sissi's life is lost: she becomes an archetype in Kreutzer's vision of petty, domestic female oppression.

Agreed, except for the "Worse".

there's a fundamental lack of narrative tension: fairly self-contained episodes pass by, ... While The Favourite used historical invention and anachronism to intensify its narrative, here Kreutzer is merely content to catalogue the restrictions on Sissi's life.

Agreed, except for the implication that narrative is somehow always superior to "mere cataloguing".

This brings me to the ending, the most flawed part of the film:

Except for the "flawed". And for the implication in the spoiler box that her assassination would've been more "narrative" than what actually happens in the film. That puzzles me.

All of which is to say, Altair has eloquently described Corsage and has warned those who require a more driving, cause-and-effect, plant-and-payoff narrative than Kreutzer offers. For those without such requirements - I, personally, can take them or leave them - I recommend the film.

[Altair]

Yes, you're right - Kreutzer's observational approach might resonate more with other viewers than it did with me. Just on the ending:

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I think if you're going to be creative, then suicide as an expression of agency needed to be explored far more than it is, because otherwise it struck me as rather desperate (the only way for her to escape domestic tyranny is to kill herself) and because it seemed as though Kreutzer didn't know where else to take the film. Surely there could be more powerful anachronistic endings possible here that don't slide into cliché?

[yoshimori]

Just on the ending:

Thanks for that. My two cents:

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Given that I was happy to follow Ms Kreutzer's "commentary" and was not especially interested in characterization any more than I was in narrative, I didn't find the ending's "expression of agency" (I like that summary) out of place. Surprising, for sure. But of a piece with a variety of Sissi's "fuck you"s throughout the film, iyam. Not the only way to escape, certainly, but, in its physics-impaired details, an imaginative and super-delightful one. At least for someone like me, who pleasures in the absurd.

[brundlefly]

Here is a woman told she has no practical use left but to be seen and so of her chief desires is to have control over how she is seen and by whom. Kreutzer’s not interested in making a biopic or a historical drama, and I don’t know that she’s audacious or methodical enough here to deconstruct or aggressively frustrate those forms. What she works at is freeing Krieps’ Elisabeth from them. To paraphrase Ridicule, the queen cannot be a subject.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to spend most of this with a gnawing dissatisfaction, whether or not you go in wanting what Altair did. The title may be a too-neat metaphor for a pattern of behavior, restriction and release. (And all that lacing up only to be told by her children that her actions are “not fit”/”unfitting!”) Kreutzer avoids the standard bird cages and the staring wistfully out of windows (boldly pushes against that one); substitutes actual caged women and a quick expressionist turn (out of place stylistically, but proves necessary). A late heave toward the unknowability of others may be a parody on that obvious take, though it’s one also teased throughout by apportioned helpings of Camille’s “She Was.” And while it’s silly to say frustration with a few of the film’s crass particulars actually helps the film along its path, it dovetails nicely with the mediated access to the main character and meets own her level of fulfillment. We can all roll our eyes together. The movie’s not out to communicate sustained joy.

The first time I saw it I went with little context – the fuzziest grasp of late-19th century European history and a general dislike for standard costume fare – and left agreeably told-off. Kreutzer’s not much interested in exposition, either, beyond the calendar’s year (1787) and Elisabeth’s (40). The second time I went in with some Wikipedia-level research and the context of Romy Scheider’s Sissi (the Marischka films and Visconti’s Ludwig) and as much of Netflix’ The Empress as I could stomach (about fifteen minutes). And while my overall impressions went unchanged, it was interesting to see some of the specifics Kreutzer was bristling against.

The Sissi in Ernst Marischka’s candy-colored Heimatfilme – apparently inescapable Christmastime fare in some places – is a Disney Princess 1.0 who resolves conflict by simply showing up. Domestic squabbles and international disputes have equal light weight. Each of the three films ends with a grand ceremony. Kreutzer’s film desaturates the palette in a familiar modern way, begs off ceremonies to focus on routine and escape. There are still striking outdoor images – it would deny Elisabeth’s character to paint them otherwise (and Prince Rudolf has either a Heimat book or DVD set on his bedside table), though most are darker – and Kreutzer chooses not to make interiors claustrophobic but spacious, impersonal, cold. Rooms are shown in a wide variety of dress, and Ludwig’s rooms (at Berg Palace, I’m guessing) look closer to a tenement than anything in the Visconti film. Glamour is not a priority.

Nor is likeability. Krieps’ Elisabeth, twenty-plus years older than Scheider’s Sissi, is long past plying charm. I don’t know if The Empress sticks to the Disney Princess 2.0 stance from which it starts, but the selfishness on display in Corsage is less righteous than complex and long-developed. Casual, assertive, sometimes desperate, sometimes careless and cruel and ruinous. Most of her encounters end in mutual dissatisfaction.

Even the uncomplicated, sunny Sissi films couldn’t completely hide the fact they were hiding something. In Young Empress, her father describes her life as a “golden cage.” In Fateful Years, a Roma fortune teller follows an upbeat reading with, “Poor lady. I would not want to trade places with her.” Schneider felt corseted: “I was the princess, not just in front of the camera. I was always a princess. But one day I simply did not want to be a princess anymore.” And Krieps, from the Criterion closet!, says she wanted to give Schneider “the opportunity to play like she never was allowed to play, to misbehave.” (One could argue that Schneider’s echoing laughter in Ludwig in the Herrenchiemsee Palace’s Great Hall of Mirrors nudged that way, but that laugh is doing a lot of work.)

*

“I can say anything I want as long as I smile?”

While Kreutzer works to deny the filmed Sissy myth, she gives Elisabeth

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the opportunity to make her own. The early introduction of motion pictures here isn’t common technological fetishism; it both uses anachronism to foster distrust in historical films and celebrates the medium as a method of autonomy. There are bolder options – hand the Empress a camcorder, show her filming TikToks for her followers,etc. – but Kreutzer favors a more subtle slip into fantasy. We get the joy of seeing Krieps silently explode into expletives (while being reminded of the whole “women should be seen, not heard” thing) and prance around in unladylike fashion.

After the encounter with the camera, Elisabeth and the film make note of the incomplete truths of historical image through portraiture. Elizabeth’s new portrait leaves out her cigarette, of course, but then becomes a painting of previous paintings, a myth reinforcing itself. Elisabeth notes that Princess Sophie’s portrait, all that’s left of her, got some things right and some things wrong; she confronts the knowledge that her own correct memories of the princess will die with her and thus her own post-mortem future. At some point we see a filmed clip of poor Prince Rudolf, just a sad slate. Perhaps Elisabeth’s initial attempt at a more accurate record. (I cannot remember what Elisabeth says about still photography, which she also doesn’t trust. But when she says, “Darkness is beautiful. It’s protection.” she’s also denying the light that makes photography and film possible.)

Most importantly, Elisabeth starts to make her own movie as a flipbook, and it doesn’t aim for pictorial accuracy but for fantastical expression.

Which makes me wonder at how literally people may be taking the end of this movie, or how they were surprised by it.

The only other person in the theater at my second screening rushed over to me at the end to double-check that she had seen a biopic for the correct person, because she’d looked it up and that’s not how Elisabeth died. So perhaps Krieps’ Elisabeth was more convincing than Kreutzer, because Kreutzer didn’t make a slow march to suicide, she made a prison break film.

Elisabeth is practicing at holding her breath underwater in the film’s very first scene.

Spoilers for 'Corsage' and Riley Stearns’ 'Dual'Show

One of my very favorite movies from last year is an elaborate slow march toward suicide, and this ain’t that.

Spoilers for 'Corsage' and also maybe Larrain's 'Spencer''Show

It can work both ways, of course: The movie is a long farewell tour in which she finds herself unmet by all her loved ones, slowly withdraws from reality, installs a double for both her husband’s private life and her public performance. (She starts teaching her assistant to ride like halfway through the film; her plan is clearly in place.) She jumps off a boat into the sea.

Pro-suicide arguments would include that it runs in the family. (Her son, of course. Or perhaps? Ludwig’s, “I forbid you to drown in my lake. It’s my lake,” is hilarious and of course foreshadows his death. You can take her ominous “I prefer the sea” as foreshadowing as well.) She jumps out a window. She’s unhappy and given to dramatic exits. I’m with Altair at being mystified at the introduction of heroin – movie’s already said plenty about the poor treatment of women’s mental health – but you can say it’s one more step to her removing herself from life. And it’s mentioned that the average age of death for a women in her age is her age. OTOH, she swam regularly; her window jump was a practice leap she knew she would survive; her farewell tour and other forms of withdrawal (including the heroin) weren’t just for her to say goodbye but to allow her double undisturbed distance and to explain changes in behavior. And that in this scenario, the woman assassinated twenty years later wasn’t Empress Elisabeth of Austria, but the woman who’d been playing her for twenty years. Maybe, who knows, doesn’t matter. Extra silly to parse a movie so fervently against historical accuracy for specific clues as to the nature of its fantastic ending, I apologize.

All that matters is that that’s not how Elisabeth died. You can look it up! Jumping off a (21st-century?) boat into the sea in, as yoshimori put it, a physics-impaired and super-delightful way. Never happened, and as fantasy escapes go surely better than Mike + the Mechanics and a KFC drive-thru.

This isn’t a depressive movie, it’s a movie about constraint and release. Kreutzer wanted to build a movie where she could free a woman from the image she’d been given by others. So Kreutzer made Elisabeth a movie and let her bolt from it in fantastic fashion.

[hearthesilence]

The first time I saw it I went with little context – the fuzziest grasp of late-19th century European history and a general dislike for standard costume fare – and left agreeably told-off. Kreutzer’s not much interested in exposition, either, beyond the calendar’s year (1787) and Elisabeth’s (40). The second time I went in with some Wikipedia-level research and the context of Romy Scheider’s Sissi (the Marischka films and Visconti’s Ludwig) and as much of Netflix’ The Empress as I could stomach (about fifteen minutes). And while my overall impressions went unchanged, it was interesting to see some of the specifics Kreutzer was bristling against.

I thought the anachronistic touches of the film were charming but it was initially discombobulating as I was nearly completely unfamiliar with the subject matter, so I wasn't even sure when her reign actually occurred.

Kreutzer's probably mentioned this a lot already, but when she gave the Q&A for the film, she mentioned that she was initially reluctant to do the film when Krieps approached her about it because the character is apparently ubiquitous in Austrian life - IIRC she said you'd see her face on chocolates and other various things. I imagine it would as if someone said "let's make a movie on George Washington" and to be fair, Revolutionary War era stories are popular in the U.S. (there's a series on Ben Franklin with Michael Douglas on the horizon, the same writer did one on John Adams with Paul Giamatti, and of course there's Hamilton's more imaginative interpretation) but at the same time I can see someone balking at jumping in because of the familiarity.