"There's an air of quiet death in this house, and I don't like the way it smells," Reynolds Woodcock announces over breakfast on "Phantom Thread." Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary ("Phantom Thread" co-star Vicky Krieps) seems to feel the same way about Vienna's Schönbrunn Palace, except that she's finally gotten used to the smell of it. She doesn't help that, for Christmas 1887, a peaceful death is exactly what "Elise," the now 40-year-old wife of ruler and meddlesome Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister), seems destined for.
No possibility. In the hands of Krieps and Austrian director Marie Kreutzer (who helmed the Golden Bear nominee "The Ground Beneath My Feet"), Empress Elisabeth of "Corsage" is an irreverent, often immature First Lady, wildly endearing and with a insatiable desire. to determine her own future. Having helped establish the doomed Joint Monarchy and reigned in Vienna longer than any ruler's wife, Elise certainly holds a special place in the hearts and minds of Austrians.
Director: Marie Kreutzer
Writer: Marie Kreutzer
Stars: Colin Morgan, Vicky Krieps, Ivana Urban
She had been portrayed in no fewer than four films before the late 1940s, including a 1921 Austrian short and The King Steps Out (1936), a Columbia Pictures comedy directed by Josef von Sternberg. Operas, ballets, and plays began to focus on her refreshingly futuristic directness while she was still alive. Calling her Princess Diana of Austria might be a stretch, but she's not far off. The "Portrait of Elisabeth in the Arts" section of her Wikipedia entry is, if any, substantial.
What writer-director Kreutzer sets out to do with her "Corsage" is part revisionism, part correcting the record. Elise de Krieps shows up in the bathroom before she is seen tending to her children. She visits the town madhouse before any stern state dinner. These are all attempts to portray a different kind of Elisabeth after more than a century of suffocating (and suffocatingly) helpless women. Almost all of Kreutzer's efforts to this end are successful. During a trip to the psychiatric “hospital”, Elise is reunited with a “paralyzed jerk” suffering from the side effects of syphilis. As expected, he has no idea who she is. “Last time you told me she was beautiful,” Elise says, partly wistful, partly aggrieved that she didn't say it again.
Meanwhile, The Empress' charming (but seemingly fictional) friendship with the Father of Cinematography Louis Le Prince, the first person to shoot moving pictures on celluloid, provides a couple of wonderful opportunities for Krieps to explore Elise the Entertainer. The Luxembourg actress, who has largely chosen odder roles in smaller films than her starring role in "Phantom Thread" might have allowed, seizes the opportunity with both hands. Her Elise is a born performer who ends the show as soon as she sees eyes in the audience.
Sometimes that happens literally, at some of her husband's most important and laborious state dinners, with Elise embarking on carefully choreographed blackout routines. However, it is the scenes with Louis Le Prince that contain the most electric and beautifully felt moments of “Corsage”. Crucially, they also allowed Kreutzer (and us) to go crazy over film history. To the filmmakers: more please.
But there are a couple of frustratingly didactic exceptions to Kreutzer's soulful subtlety. One is the title of the movie. In case he's unfamiliar with the hallmarks of the Habsburg era, a corsage is as much a corsage held on the wrist as it is the sometimes oppressive top of a dress. The second scene of the film is Elise dressed in an obscenely tight corset for an official occasion. Still, her role as a stylish accessory, a flower, for Franz Joseph is already clear without the additional image.
Still, her estranged emperor husband and distraught Crown Prince Rudolf (Aaron Friesz) are well portrayed, even as Kreutzer is pretty sure this isn't her movie. (Of course, she's right.) Joseph, a grumpy-faced politician who'd probably take his duties a little less seriously if he knew he was the last peacetime ruler of Austria-Hungary, is gleefully mischievous and even damnably mischievous. Handsome. Crown Prince Rudolf, whose sensational murder-suicide rocked Europe and sold millions of newspapers in 1889, hardly gets a mention. Presumably this is to counteract the immense weight that all other depictions of Elisabeth in the story gave to the Mayerling incident.
And, without giving too much away, it's a sad note that we're also leaving Elise on. Her true fate is altered, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" style, allowing the Empress to control her narrative like she never could. At the end of "Corsage", Kreutzer reveals that this is the main intention of the film all along. It's undeniably noble, even if the execution of Elise's legacy recovery leaves a somewhat bitter taste.
From the birth of Mozart in 1756 to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, Vienna's golden age was, to paraphrase Darlene Madison Cox, an important and exciting time. However, Empress Elisabeth from “Corsage” is not sorry. During that time, Europe's second cultural city (it was never Paris) was home to Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Strauss, Klimt and Freud. And, though Beethoven died a decade before he was born, "Für Elise" packs a different punch when it accompanies one of Elisabeth's meltdowns. Although "Corsage" makes a worthy attempt to recast Elisabeth as independent of her limitations, her final note leaves her feeling too much like her own kind of requiem.
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