Corsage

A fantastic, highly nuanced showcase for a magnetic Vicky Krieps as the complicated Empress Elizabeth, but in a film that could neither match or carry Krieps’, or Sisi’s, complexity and weightage. 

The emotional shallowness surrounding the character was as light as Sisi’s weight despite writer/director Marie Kreutzer’s similar obsessiveness to create inter-character conflicts. There were multiple interesting threads, Sisi and her children, Sisi and her husband, Sisi and her horse-riding “instructor”, Sisi and her cousin King Ludwig, but they all failed to be anything more than superficial lip service - an excuse for Kreutzer to film some beautiful scenes and string together vignettes of moments that supposedly should deepen Sisi’s characterisation but simply lacked substantial purposes. 

Perhaps the most meaningful relationship was between Sisi and her lady-in-waiting Countess Marie Festetics, and that relationship would have been so much interesting if, like most of the film, Kreutzer had fictionalised more of it. 

That said, as the protagonist we were still deeply empathetic towards Sisi as she struggled to find a way to fulfil her feministic desires and ideals in a misogynistic society but the narrative failed to provide a reason for us to root for her. And Krieps was really selling it giving us a full tour of Sisi’s interiority and, if there was any justice, she would have deserved an Andrea Riseborough-esque grassroot Oscar campaign!