It’s impossible to over-estimate how big the Empress Elisabeth of Austria is – in Austria. She was a superstar celebrity in the 19th century at a time when such things were never heard of.
But can the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Princess Di generate as much excitement away from home?
Corsage is an Austrian film nominated for a Foreign Language Bafta and it has to be said that the film – starring Luxembourg’s greatest hit Vicki Krieps – does assume at least a nodding acquaintance with the Empress Elisabeth.
The fact is, outside Austria not only does the rest of the world know very little of the Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – nicknamed “Sissi” – it’s rather forgotten the Empire itself.
Photo: AG PRODUKTION
The empire blended two countries – Austria and Hungary – around the 1860s. And the dual monarchy was symbolised by the marriage between Emperor Franz-Josef and his Empress, Elisabeth, who became one of the most famous people in Europe.
She still is in certain parts of Europe. There’s an entire museum devoted to Sissi in Vienna, and you can’t go anywhere in Hungary, I believe, without running into Sissi portraits and memorabilia.
For her later fame you can blame the movies.
Sissi was big enough before the 1950s, but then three films came out (Sissi (1955), Sissi – The Young Empress (1956) and Sissi – Fateful Years of an Empress (1957)) about the young Empress, starring soon-to-be superstar Romy Schneider. And for decades all three movies were played every Christmas on Austrian television.
Possibly Corsage has been devised as a sort of antidote to all that Sissi-mania.
Corsage opens some years after what you might call the Romy Schneider years. She’s on the verge of 40 – a terrible number for a celebrity whose importance, in her own eyes at any rate, rests entirely on her physical beauty.
She spends much of the movie maintaining her ideal, Sissi body-weight, and corseting her waist to impossible tightness.
Like her later equivalent, the UK’s Princess Diana, Sissi is driven by a love for her children, a desire to be liked by ordinary people, and also to have something to do.
She’s always at odds with her husband, the Emperor Franz-Josef, who impatiently dismisses her interest in current affairs.
It’s my job to look after the Empire, he says. It’s your job to represent the Hungarian half of it. That’s why I married you.
Even a far less ambitious Empress would resent that sort of snub. So Sissi spends a lot of time touring the stately homes of Europe.
And like many people defined - rightly or wrongly - by their looks, Empress Sissi flirts outrageously with everyone. In her case that means the more attractive men of Europe’s royal families – including the British one.
Why should she care, she wonders? After all, do lions care what sheep think of them?
This was clearly a famous Sissi quote. But Corsage is careful to avoid too pointed criticism, lest it scare off the Sissi fans.
Yes, she flirted with King Ludwig of Bavaria, but no more than that. And yes, she was vain and idle, but she wasn’t stupid.
Which doesn’t leave anywhere much for Corsage to go. Krieps is well cast as the tall, glamorous Empress, but, like Sissi’s own story perhaps, the film shines a light without offering much to think about.
