And yet it is possible in other ways for a slavery to historical or historical accuracy to contradict an intended artistic statement. Most books about the Habsburg dynasty or 19th-century history were written by men and define Empress Sisi in a very special way. As any biopic creator could tell you, sticking too closely to the facts can obscure rather than clarify. So it’s refreshing that Kreutzer incorporates so many devious anachronisms into her film; the subtle kind that makes you take it twice. A yellow plastic rag hangs in the hallway of an 18th-century Austrian palace, or a black corded telephone hangs on the wall. None of the objects are visually lingering or as striking as, say, the Converse All-Stars’ shot in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. (This film is another deliciously subversive biopic of a controversial woman in history, a comparison that is both useful and somewhat limiting, as it is tonally very different, more assertive, and decidedly more frivolous – to match its protagonist’s youthfulness – than Corsage , where her heroine is older, but one cannot imagine the temperament of young Sisi being too different from Marie.)
“We’re always so sure about history books,” says Kreutzer of historical accuracy. “But so much of what we think we know comes from other films on a subject. And we think we know exactly when something was created, but there’s almost always someone else who might have had the same idea earlier. So if I wanted to use a chair from 1910, I used it, it became very playful, and the idea was to integrate [the anachronisms], so it doesn’t feel too obvious. So it’s modern, but in a subtle way. It was the same with the music – we let it be played live, only with instruments that only existed at the time.”
Kreutzer pulls off a really delicate and challenging balancing act of telling the core truths of Sisi’s life — including the uglier ones about mental health — without conveying a daunting, dejected image of another suffering woman. The result is a film that, despite the corset, a constraining garment, bears his name, is flexible and open both in its visual slang and in its approach to depicting history and femininity. Vicky Krieps and Marie Kreutzer created a living, breathing woman who pouts and sings and loves her dogs and masturbates in the bathtub. They did a pretty amazing thing with Corsage: cracked open the alabaster facade of a 19th-century glamor icon and made it real.
Corsage will be released in the US on December 23, in the UK on December 26 and in France on January 25, 2023.
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