Review: Corsage is a wilting flower
From its earliest days, cinema has been preoccupied with the inadequacy of monarchical lives, particularly those of women. In 1895, often regarded as the year in which movies were born, Thomas Edison produced The Execution of Mary Stuart, an eighteen-second short that depicts the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. It is the first film known to use special effects — in this case, a stop trick, to replicate the ruler’s decapitation.
The ill-fated queen has since been portrayed on film many times over, from Fay Compton to Katharine Hepburn to Saoirse Ronan to Vanessa Redgrave, to say nothing of her infamous rival, Elizabeth, who has been incarnated by seemingly every great woman actor in history, from Bette Davis to Glenda Jackson to Cate Blanchett to Judi Dench. And, I suppose, Margot Robbie.
Add to these names those of Victoria (Dench again, plus Irene Dunne, Kathy Bates, and Emily Blunt), Christina (Garbo and Liv Ullmann), Marie Antoinette (Norma Shearer, and then, seventy years later, Kirsten Dunst) and, of course, the dearly departed Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson, Olivia Colman, Claire Foy, Imelda Staunton, etc.) — and what have you got? A miserable lot of extremely privileged ladies. (I avoid mention of Cleopatra or else we’d be here ‘til the cows come home.)
But according to Corsage, a new biopic of the rather under-represented Elisabeth of Austria, there’s a film to predate all these other efforts. In 1878, during a sojourn to England, the myopic empress (played with weary luminosity by Vicky Krieps, who also serves as an executive producer) encounters an inventor by the name of Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield). He tells Elisabeth of a new device that can capture human movement via the rapid succession of still photographs. He asks her to pose for him, and, after some flattery (the forty-year-old ruler likes to be told that she’s still worth a gander), she agrees.
The next day, on a hillside, Le Prince records Elisabeth — who has fled from the stifling edicts of her husband, Franz Josef I (the pretty, fluttering, and sad-eyed Florian Teichtmeister) — as she cavorts through the grass in a simple black dress. “Does it hear what I say?,” she asks of his camera, anticipating the warbling strains of “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” by a good forty-nine years. “What a wonderful idea,” the inventor concedes. “Alas, it does not.”
The Empress smiles to herself, then starts to scream obscenities. We never hear these screams, due to director Marie Kreutzer’s swift cut to Le Prince’s audio-less footage, but the woman’s liberation is undeniable. She hops up and down, grinning from ear to ear. Elated.
Sadly, this magical encounter never really took place. It’s one of the many anachronistic indulgences of Corsage, a historical drama that strives for the genre- and era-defying whimsicality of Baz Luhrmann or Sofia Coppola yet never quite strikes a balance between period fidelity and modern intrusions. There are a few moments of blissful incongruity — e.g., the Emperor peeling off his false beard at the end of a long day, or Elisabeth asking a cot-bound amputee to scooch over so she might lie down and share a cigarette with him — but these flights of fancy are contradicted by an overwhelmingly limp, moribund and drifting tone.
Though Kreutzer is ostensibly clever in her approach to Elisabeth’s life — framing the monarch as a misunderstood rebel who identifies more closely with the hysterical inmates of a women’s psychiatric hospital than she does with the genteel courtesans who flock about her husband — she also cannot extricate herself or her movie from the visual sumptuousness of the Austrian court. It’s curious to consider why film, a self-consciously modern art form, tends to gravitate towards nobility; is it that discontented royals serve as a sort of testament to the antiquated past, thus strengthening cinema’s allegiance to democracy? Or could it be that cinema, initially and evermore a product of the masses, aspires to some of the grandeur, some of the respectability of aristocratic traditions?
Stories like those of Empress Elisabeth allow cinema to have it both ways: acknowledging women’s entrapment, be they rich or poor, while simultaneously lapping up aesthetics to the detriment of politics.
This film definitely suffers from elements beyond its makers’ control, such as limits in budget and, therefore, production value. Yet even beyond its practical constraints, Corsage is a wilting flower, delicate in beauty yet frail in composition. “Monarchy is on the decline,” mutters doomed Prince Rudolf (Aaron Friesz) to his mother at a formal event, reflecting on their mutual obsolescence. I doubt that movies about royals will go away anytime soon — yet one has to wonder why projects such as this ever get off the ground. What more is there to learn from Krieps’ Elisabeth that is not already evinced in the fitful stoicism of Garbo’s Christina, or the restless passion of Vanessa Kirby’s Princess Margaret?
It is not enough to draw parallels between prominent women of the past and ongoing issues of gender inequality. There must also be a formal thought, a thesis in execution, to justify such a deferential choice in subject. Otherwise, why not tell the story of a maid? Or of a lady-in-waiting?
