If you’ve watched a certain TV documentary series recently, you may have encountered the notion that belonging to royalty is a little like movie stardom – and that both are conditions you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The grandmother of all beleaguered royals-as-celebs – before Diana, Princess of Wales, before Princess Grace, before you know who off Netflix – was Elisabeth of Austria (1837-98). Fondly known as Sissi, or Sisi, she was the subject of a reverential cult of glamour in her day, and in the 1950s was played on screen by Romy Schneider in an adulatory Sissi trilogy that made the young empress an ideologically charged homegrown Disney princess.
Now comes Corsage, a feminist dismantling of Sissiolatry by the Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer, shortlisted as her country’s contender in this year’s Academy Awards. Kreutzer is best known for her unsettling 2019 psychodrama The Ground Beneath My Feet, and Corsage is similarly about a woman feeling that the ground might crumble beneath hers – clinging tenuously to her sanity while the Austro-Hungarian empire suffocates her with its starched protocol.
