In short: Corsage (2022)

Quite a few filmmakers approaching their material the same way as Marie Kreutzer does in this art house darling concerning a highly fictionalized version of the last year in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, or as anyone in a German language country who has seen a certain 50s film trilogy will know her by, “Sissy”, would end up with a film that seems rather too in love with its own eccentricity.

Kreutzer is a much too controlled director for her to let things slip out of her hands that easily, so her flights of fancy, the conscious use of anachronistic elements – sometimes in genuinely funny ways – her sardonic humour as well as the film’s genuine humanity and care for its characters feel rather more of a piece than you’d expect when reading up on the film. In fact, even though it doesn’t at first appear so, this is an absolute masterpiece of directorial control over spiky and complicated material. Thus, Kreutzer – helped by a riveting central performance by Vicky Krieps – can take all her film’s seemingly disparate elements – the commentary on star cult, on the treatment of aging women, loneliness sexual, emotional and intellectual in a world where a woman is supposed to repress the first, not show the middle, and lack the last, depression, the satire of KuK clichés and so on – and turn them into a movie that is absolutely of one piece. In fact, as Kreutzer uses them, all these elements and directions turn out to be not so disparate at all but absolutely necessary parts in talking about her complex interests.

That Corsage is also often wickedly funny, or sad, and staged with enormous power is one result of this approach.