Royalty and the pedestal-prison of womanhood is the theme of this new film from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, imagining the home life of the Hapsburg Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1877, the year of her 40th birthday. Like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Pablo Larraín’s Princess Diana, the kaiserin lives in a luxurious delirium of loneliness: notionally cherished, actually patronised.
The movie even shows the empress riding at the Northamptonshire estates of Diana’s ancestor, the fifth Earl Spencer – and enjoying there a capricious romantic flirtation with her riding instructor. It’s broadly historically accurate, though this doesn’t apply to the use of Help Me Make It Through the Night on the soundtrack or indeed Elizabeth’s encounter with later inventions such as cinema and heroin. But Kreutzer sees her political melancholy as part of the tension that led to the first world war.
