We’ll be dealing with dramatizations of the lives of royals forever, if only because the public/private schism of They Who Wear The Crowns and those who live in their vicinity is so temptingly easy to map out on paper. All that circumstantial pomp, all those game-day faces and manners, colliding with so much backstage intrigue, away from prying eyes. The hypocrisy! The clothes! The wealth! The loneliness!
“Corsage” is like that, but it’s really good, and far less hidebound than most treatments of its ilk. It stars Luxembourg-born actor Vicky Kriepsas Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, the 19th-century empress of Austria and queen of Hungary known popularly as Sissi.
Krieps worked steadily in Europe for years prior to her English-language breakout role as Alma, opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, in the lovely, twisted “Phantom Thread” (2017). The second you saw her in that film — and heard that thrummy, expressive voice on the soundtrack, in voice-over — it wasn’t a star-is-born moment so much as a cinematic exhale, a recognition of someone who has everything.
