Cannes Review: Vicky Krieps In ‘Corsage’
deadline.comIt took the Empress Elisabeth’s strongest lady’s maid an hour every morning to lace her stays. The Emperor Franz-Joseph’s wife Sisi, as she was fondly known to the subjects of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was famous for the narrowness of her waist, which reputedly measured 19 and a half inches; the slightest weight gain was a matter of seething public interest.
It looks very much as if Vicky Krieps, who brings great complexity to her portrait of the empress in Marie Kreutzer’s Un Certain Regard title Corsage, shares the imperial measurements.
Let’s hope that is just a trick of the camera. So much corsetry — or corsage, the word we hear much used in the royal dressing-rooms of 19th-century Vienna — doesn’t leave much room for little things like ribs.Sisi was a Bavarian princess, given a liberal upbringing by her royal but bohemian parents, who married the emperor (Florian Teichtmeister: superbly restrained) when she was 16 and was on the throne for 44 years.
Kreutzer’s script focuses on just one of those years: 1878, the year Sisi turned 40 which, as her doctor points out, was the average age of death among her female subjects.
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