Anti-“Crown” – Weekend – Kommersant
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Austrian Marie Kreuzer’s film about Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria, Sissi, is a delightfully free drama about a forty-year-old woman who is fed up with everything.
Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria skillfully faints at official receptions, smokes cigarettes one after another, flirts with a groom, tortures herself with gymnastics, checks how many seconds she can spend under water, terrifies the ladies-in-waiting, demanding to tighten her corsage more and more so that her famous waist – 45 cm – looked like a young girl. She is extravagant – she can go in the clothes of a maid to follow the alleged mistress of her husband-emperor, or she can wake her daughter in the middle of the night and arrange a wild night ride on horseback. Can lie in bed with a legless soldier during a visit to the hospital – just smoke together. He can ask the patient of a psychiatric hospital, who is no longer able to understand anything: “Do you remember me? In September, you said I was beautiful.” She wants to be beautiful, she wants to be wanted. But she had just turned 40 on Christmas Eve 1877. This is old age. Moreover, in Austria at the end of the 19th century, this is the average life expectancy of women. Elizabeth flirts with death, unsuccessfully tries to seduce her husband, does not find a place for herself in an empty, echoing palace, which is too small for her. She rushes to travel, she is cramped, cramped with herself, cramped in this time, in this role, in this body, in this world.
This Elizabeth has nothing to do with the official portraits of the Empress, with a plastic Romy Schneider from the Sissi trilogy by Ernst Marischka, with stamped Elizabeth from cups and magnets from Viennese souvenir shops. But, surprisingly, it has nothing in common with Princess Diana from the melodramatic “Spencer” Pablo Larraina, British Queen Elizabeth from the TV series “Crown” or rebellious candy Marie Antoinette from Sofia Coppola’s film. The drama of the Austrian Marie Kreuzer “Korsage” tells not about the fact that empresses are people too, not about the fact that women know how to make history, not about the fact that forty-year-old ladies in the 19th century were sad, not about the fight against old age, and certainly not about the fact that a century and a half ago there were beautiful dresses at the court.
For Kreuzer (“Fatherlessness”, “The Earth Under My Feet”), the Empress is just a woman, shackled by her own role. Her children are embarrassed, her daughter says all the time: “But, mom, this is not appropriate,” the son also makes comments. The husband is interested in young people. The sweet friend, as she immediately states, “reminds me of her wallpaper.” The closest lady-in-waiting wants to get married. The best horse had to be shot. There are many melancholic women in the psychiatric hospital, hospitals are full of the wounded. The subjects want to see her beautiful and silent. “Your task is to personify the fate of the empire,” her husband reminds her; well, the empress is going all out because the empire is doomed.
This is a wild, gloomy digression into a non-existent history, a year in the life of the Empress of Austria, who is sure that at the age of 40 a person dissipates, darkens like a cloud. Dark colors: purple, dark blue, greenish, brown, gray, black. Decay color. Marie Kreuzer calibrates every shot, robs the imperial court of pomp, rips off—sometimes literally—sideburns and puffy dresses from their majesties, and rips off history from Austria like a hurricane. She specifically asked the set designers to remove as much furniture from the frame as possible, and the dressers to keep the dresses as simple as possible: “To make everything look as if the most expensive pieces of furniture were sold for debts.”
The world begins to fail as soon as the Empress turns forty. The modest inventor Louis Leprince comes to her, wants to capture her in motion, he just came up with a special camera. No, the sound is not yet playable. Yes, you can say whatever you want.
She speaks. And does what he wants. Marie Kreuzer and actress Vicki Krieps (living wildly and wildly in the frame) give Elizabeth amazing freedom: not only the freedom to change places with her lady-in-waiting, not only the freedom to show the middle finger to everyone gathered at the gala dinner, but also the freedom to laugh at the wrong time, to allow yourself to argue with the emperor, to be something a true empress would never allow herself to become. The real Elizabeth, with age, began to wear a thick veil, made masks from raw veal, forbade herself to be photographed, until the last day she adored her long hair and counted how much it fell out every day, died at the hands of a killer at 60 years old.
Everything is different in Corsage. First, I want to double-check everything: in what year was the French press invented? When did Louis Leprince actually introduce his chronophotographic camera to the public? When did cool baths start treating psychoses? When did heroin appear? When did Kris Kristofferson come up with his ballad “Help me make it through the night” in 1878? The reality of the film – a gloomy, gloomy, convincingly shabby reality of the 19th century – gets thinner as it goes on, and when the Empress, perfectly holding her back, walks past a plastic bucket with a mop, it becomes clear that the monarchy is really nearing the end.
In the novel The Last World by the Austrian Christoph Ransmayr, Publius Ovid Nason, at a sign from the divine emperor Augustus, enters the stadium to make a speech and stands before a bouquet of dimly gleaming microphones. In Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, with which the Kreuzer film was compared at the stage of financing, the young empress has lilac Converses and a lot of trendy music. In Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Lavra, plastic bottles are lying around in a 15th-century forest. But with Marie Kreuzer, anachronisms work much more subtle: she formally remains in the biopic genre, but shakes its foundations, keeps the viewer in suspense, does not allow him to forget that somewhere on the periphery of his gaze, something can happen that completely changes the whole story.
Kreuzer removes first historical authenticity from the history of the empress, then the empress herself, leaving only a forty-year-old woman who shows the middle finger to the monarchy, old age, death, history. Vicki Crips (“Phantom Thread”, “Bergman’s Island”) here shows the highest class of the game (a prize for the best role in the competition “Un Certain Regard” Cannes-2022). She herself suggested Kreuzer to make a film about Elizabeth – the result was a drama not about the empress, but about restlessness, about non-humility, about the fact that everyone has their own role and the highest happiness is not to play it.
In theaters from 20 October
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