“The lion doesn’t lose sleep over the opinion of sheep”, scolds Empress Elisabeth of Austria to her husband, Franz Joseph in Marie Kreutzer’s deliriously delicious, anarchic and anachronistic CORSAGE.
It’s a telling and acerbic remark teetering on rebuke. And rebuke the Duke is de riguer in this eminently entertaining swipe at patriarchy, the press and ancestral privilege.
Empress Elisabeth of Austria was, apparently, idolised for her beauty and renowned for inspiring fashion trends. But in 1877, ‘Sissi’, as she was affectionately known, celebrated her 40th birthday and fought with due diligence to maintain her public image by lacing her corset tighter and tighter. Dieting was also employed to set the taste of fashion for society and the insidious and intrusive tell tale tabloids.
Her waistline ironically mirroring Elisabeth’s role in the royal household, reduced against her wishes to purely performative, her hunger for knowledge and zest for life made her more and more restless in Vienna.
In CORSAGE, she travels to England, visiting Bray, a Brit horseman who gives rise to the hearsay of her whoring, and Bavaria, to carouse with her cousin, Ludwig, of mad castle fame.
These escapades are a keen attempt to rekindle the excitement and purpose of her youth. With a future of strictly ceremonial duties laid out in front of her, she conspires to rebel against the impossible image of herself and hatch a duplicitous plan to protect her legacy.
CORSAGE is a costume drama turned on its head, a biopic dragged from the dustbin of history and given contemporary spin. For those who feel there’s a surfeit of fiction over fact, let them watch a documentary.
This film has the versatile and vibrant Vicky Krieps who presents a provocative evocation of Elisabeth, fuelled with feminist inflammation. She blazes and sizzles across the screen, a mesmerising monarch, a regal performance.
As a look at royalty, CORSAGE is as timely as Prince Harry’s tell-all, Spare, and the inclusion of renditions of Help Me Make It Through the Night and As Tears Go By in the soundtrack are pitch perfect.
If you enjoy mixing your metamorphoses, please stay seated for the surprise end credits sequence. CORSAGE- way cool.