Corsage (Marie Kreutzer, 2022) Vicky Krieps, Colin Morgan, Florian Teichmeister; fictional account of one year in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. On Christmas Eve 1877, Elisabeth, once idolized for her beauty, turns 40 and is officially deemed an old woman; she starts trying to maintain her public image.
Peter Bradshaw:
In many ways this is a study in anger, and it is an austere and angular picture. Krieps gives an exhilaratingly fierce, uningratiating performance. Kreutzer’s last film, The Ground Beneath My Feet, from 2019, had just the same shrewd sense of how women are isolated and restricted by whatever status they have been able to cultivate. For Elisabeth, the personal is political. The Guardian.
Jonathan Romney:
What consistently mesmerises, however, is the lead performance by Krieps, so coolly fascinating in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Subsequent roles, such as in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, have tended to foreground her register of coltish neurosis, and there’s something of that here. But Krieps also imparts reckless caprice, barely contained desperation, and poised disdain for a moribund milieu. Her face at times suggests a Botticelli softness, at others it freezes into an impenetrable shell of geometric planes – while her sometimes sotto voce delivery blithely evades easy communication. You sense that as an actor, Krieps’s own imperial phase is just beginning. The Guardian.
Keith Watson:
In a completely invented deviation from Empress Elisabeth’s actual life, which was snuffed out in 1898 by an assassin’s hand in Geneva, Kreutzer ... [spoiler eliminated] It’s Corsage’s most dramatic break with realism but certainly not its first. Peppered throughout are anachronistic details, such as metal panic bars on some doors and a modern mop propped against a wall, that prevent us from completely losing ourselves in this seemingly distant reality that’s so different from our own. Elisabeth’s story, as told in Corsage, is ultimately not really about the social strictures of the past, but rather the issues that women of all social strata have dealt with throughout history: self-doubt, repression, fear of aging, a lack of autonomy. slantmagazine.
IMDb page.
Wikipedia page.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 29 January, 2023 | Now: 29 January, 2023