Corsage film review — Vicky Krieps crackles as an empress on the edge

Heavy is the head that wears a kilo of tin. That weight is the crown as described in Corsage, a jagged, half-fictional snapshot of the 19th-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Long tidied up by the heritage industry into the sweetly free-spirited “Sisi”, she is played here by a crackerjack Vicky Krieps. The mood is like a violin string being tuned to the brink of snapping. The sharp corners say: no gift shop here.

Still, at a pinch you could call it a Christmas film. Mapping a year in vignettes, we begin in December 1877. Forest trees decorate Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, dwarfed by the ceilings. Such is the scale of things here, where a furious walk from the dinner table to your spouse’s bedroom takes endless, silent seconds of screen time.

The woman brought to vivid life by Krieps and director Marie Kreutzer is big enough to fill the space: magnetic if mercurial, fiercely intelligent. But duty can still shrink her. The title comes from the corsetry with which the empress viciously narrows her waist, at once an act of ritual self control, borderline self-harm, and part of the theatre of royalty and femininity.

Theatre is everywhere in Schönbrunn. Semi-estranged husband Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister) peels off his ceremonial sideburns when away from prying eyes; flunkeys wander backstairs corridors; out in Vienna, the newspapers are always watching.

Kreutzer gets all the modern echoes. The film would make an obvious bookend to Spencer, last year’s wacky account of Princess Diana, as well as Sofia Coppola’s slickly snotty Marie Antoinette. But Corsage is more astringent than either, a one-off like the Elisabeth we see presented here in shards of portraiture, through masked excursions into the city, stays at English country houses, visits to asylums. Out-of-time flashes grab the attention (a harpist plays “As Tears Go By”), but the point has already been made. Period pieces be damned. Where Elisabeth leads, modernity will follow.

That fact is underlined by the motion picture camera she is introduced to. (Another anachronism.) If Elisabeth was a film star before films, Krieps is one now: the jewel in a movie that dares question the very point of crowns.

★★★★☆

In US cinemas from December 23 and UK cinemas from December 26