Empress Elisabeth of Austria, a starlet of 19th-century Europe, refused to have her photograph taken after she reached her mid-thirties. It’s a detail that hasn’t been copied over to Corsage, Marie Kreutzer’s tastefully anachronistic film about the Hapsburg royal. But that absence of photos as Elisabeth aged remains central to Kreutzer’s vision. Elizabeth believed beauty was her only currency, and she would do anything to preserve it. That includes, most infamously, a tightly corseted waist that measured a mere 19.5 inches.
We’ve seen many onscreen Elisabeths before. Romy Schneider, in the Fifties, starred in a television trilogy that reimagined her life as a bouncy, sweet-souled fairytale. It soon became a Christmas staple in Germany and Austria. Netflix only recently debuted its more feminist-minded take, The Empress, starring Devrim Lingnau. Many depictions offer ample time to the controversy that rocked Elisabeth’s later years when her son, Crown Prince Rudolf (here portrayed by Aaron Friesz), died in a suicide pact with his 17-year-old mistress Mary Vetsera.
