Here is a woman told she has no practical use left but to be seen and so of her chief desires is to have control over how she is seen and by whom. Kreutzer’s not interested in making a biopic or a historical drama, and I don’t know that she’s audacious or methodical enough here to deconstruct or aggressively frustrate those forms. What she works at is freeing Krieps’ Elisabeth from them. To paraphrase
Ridicule, the queen cannot be a subject.
I don’t think it’s inappropriate to spend most of this with a gnawing dissatisfaction, whether or not you go in wanting what Altair did. The title may be a too-neat metaphor for a pattern of behavior, restriction and release. (And all that lacing up only to be told by her children that her actions are “not fit”/”unfitting!”) Kreutzer avoids the standard bird cages and the staring wistfully out of windows (boldly pushes against that one); substitutes actual caged women and a quick expressionist turn (out of place stylistically, but proves necessary). A late heave toward the unknowability of others may be a parody on that obvious take, though it’s one also teased throughout by apportioned helpings of Camille’s “
She Was.” And while it’s silly to say frustration with a few of the film’s crass particulars actually helps the film along its path, it dovetails nicely with the mediated access to the main character and meets own her level of fulfillment. We can all roll our eyes together. The movie’s not out to communicate sustained joy.
The first time I saw it I went with little context – the fuzziest grasp of late-19th century European history and a general dislike for standard costume fare – and left agreeably told-off. Kreutzer’s not much interested in exposition, either, beyond the calendar’s year (1787) and Elisabeth’s (40). The second time I went in with some Wikipedia-level research and the context of Romy Scheider’s Sissi (the Marischka films and Visconti’s
Ludwig) and as much of Netflix’
The Empress as I could stomach (about fifteen minutes). And while my overall impressions went unchanged, it was interesting to see some of the specifics Kreutzer was bristling against.
The Sissi in Ernst Marischka’s candy-colored Heimatfilme – apparently inescapable Christmastime fare in some places – is a Disney Princess 1.0 who resolves conflict by simply showing up. Domestic squabbles and international disputes have equal light weight. Each of the three films ends with a grand ceremony. Kreutzer’s film desaturates the palette in a familiar modern way, begs off ceremonies to focus on routine and escape. There are still striking outdoor images – it would deny Elisabeth’s character to paint them otherwise (and Prince Rudolf has either a
Heimat book or DVD set on his bedside table), though most are darker – and Kreutzer chooses not to make interiors claustrophobic but spacious, impersonal, cold. Rooms are shown in a wide variety of dress, and Ludwig’s rooms (at Berg Palace, I’m guessing) look closer to a tenement than anything in the Visconti film. Glamour is not a priority.
Nor is likeability. Krieps’ Elisabeth, twenty-plus years older than Scheider’s Sissi, is long past plying charm. I don’t know if
The Empress sticks to the Disney Princess 2.0 stance from which it starts, but the selfishness on display in
Corsage is less righteous than complex and long-developed. Casual, assertive, sometimes desperate, sometimes careless and cruel and ruinous. Most of her encounters end in mutual dissatisfaction.
Even the uncomplicated, sunny Sissi films couldn’t completely hide the fact they were hiding something. In
Young Empress, her father describes her life as a “golden cage.” In
Fateful Years, a Roma fortune teller follows an upbeat reading with, “Poor lady. I would not want to trade places with her.” Schneider felt corseted: “I was the princess, not just in front of the camera. I was always a princess.
But one day I simply did not want to be a princess anymore.” And Krieps,
from the Criterion closet!, says she wanted to give Schneider “the opportunity to play like she never was allowed to play, to misbehave.” (One could argue that Schneider’s echoing laughter in
Ludwig in the Herrenchiemsee Palace’s Great Hall of Mirrors nudged that way, but that laugh is doing a lot of work.)
*
“I can say anything I want as long as I smile?”
While Kreutzer works to deny the filmed Sissy myth, she gives Elisabeth
the opportunity to make her own. The early introduction of motion pictures here isn’t common technological fetishism; it both uses anachronism to foster distrust in historical films and celebrates the medium as a method of autonomy. There are bolder options – hand the Empress a camcorder, show her filming TikToks for her followers,etc. – but Kreutzer favors a more subtle slip into fantasy. We get the joy of seeing Krieps silently explode into expletives (while being reminded of the whole “women should be seen, not heard” thing) and prance around in unladylike fashion.
After the encounter with the camera, Elisabeth and the film make note of the incomplete truths of historical image through portraiture. Elizabeth’s new portrait leaves out her cigarette, of course, but then becomes a painting of previous paintings, a myth reinforcing itself. Elisabeth notes that Princess Sophie’s portrait, all that’s left of her, got some things right and some things wrong; she confronts the knowledge that her own correct memories of the princess will die with her and thus her own post-mortem future. At some point we see a filmed clip of poor Prince Rudolf, just a sad slate. Perhaps Elisabeth’s initial attempt at a more accurate record. (I cannot remember what Elisabeth says about still photography, which she also doesn’t trust. But when she says, “Darkness is beautiful. It’s protection.” she’s also denying the light that makes photography and film possible.)
Most importantly, Elisabeth starts to make her own movie as a flipbook, and it doesn’t aim for pictorial accuracy but for fantastical expression.
Which makes me wonder at how literally people may be taking the end of this movie, or how they were surprised by it.
The only other person in the theater at my second screening rushed over to me at the end to double-check that she had seen a biopic for the correct person, because she’d looked it up and that’s not how Elisabeth died. So perhaps Krieps’ Elisabeth was more convincing than Kreutzer, because Kreutzer didn’t make a slow march to suicide, she made a prison break film.
Elisabeth is practicing at holding her breath underwater in the film’s very first scene.
One of my
very favorite movies from last year is an elaborate slow march toward suicide, and this ain’t that.
It can work both ways, of course: The movie is a long farewell tour in which she finds herself unmet by all her loved ones, slowly withdraws from reality, installs a double for both her husband’s private life and her public performance. (She starts teaching her assistant to ride like halfway through the film; her plan is clearly in place.) She jumps off a boat into the sea.
Pro-suicide arguments would include that it runs in the family. (Her son, of course. Or perhaps? Ludwig’s, “I forbid you to drown in my lake. It’s my lake,” is hilarious and of course foreshadows
his death. You can take her ominous “I prefer the sea” as foreshadowing as well.) She jumps out a window. She’s unhappy and given to dramatic exits. I’m with Altair at being mystified at the introduction of heroin – movie’s already said plenty about the poor treatment of women’s mental health – but you can say it’s one more step to her removing herself from life. And it’s mentioned that the average age of death for a women in her age is her age. OTOH, she swam regularly; her window jump was a practice leap she knew she would survive; her farewell tour and other forms of withdrawal (including the heroin) weren’t just for her to say goodbye but to allow her double undisturbed distance and to explain changes in behavior. And that in this scenario, the woman assassinated twenty years later wasn’t Empress Elisabeth of Austria, but the woman who’d been playing her for twenty years. Maybe, who knows, doesn’t matter. Extra silly to parse a movie so fervently against historical accuracy for specific clues as to the nature of its fantastic ending, I apologize.
All that matters is that that’s not how Elisabeth died. You can look it up! Jumping off a (21st-century?) boat into the sea in, as yoshimori put it, a physics-impaired and super-delightful way. Never happened, and as fantasy escapes go surely better than
Mike + the Mechanics and a KFC drive-thru.
This isn’t a depressive movie, it’s a movie about constraint and release. Kreutzer wanted to build a movie where she could free a woman from the image she’d been given by others. So Kreutzer made Elisabeth a movie and let her bolt from it in fantastic fashion.