Corsage

Marie Kreutzer's Corsage opened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2022 and won Vicky Krieps the Best Performance prize. It established Kreutzer, an Austrian director previously best known for The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019), as a major figure in contemporary German-language cinema, and Krieps's performance, one of the best of that year, went on to a Best Actress nomination at the European Film Awards.

Vienna, 1877. On her fortieth birthday, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, already mythologised across Europe as a fashion icon, an obsessive horsewoman and a fasting near-anorexic, finds the corset of her public role unbearable. The film follows her through the months that follow: visits to her cousin Ludwig II in Bavaria, social rounds in Hungary and England, hunting trips, fencing lessons, the small daily negotiations of a woman who knows her body has been performing a public role for two decades. Florian Teichtmeister plays Emperor Franz Joseph; Katharina Lorenz plays the Countess Marie Festetics.

Kreutzer has no use for period-drama convention. Modern songs, Camille's She Was among them, turn up on the soundtrack, telephones and other later technologies wander into the frame, and the historical record is bent towards emotional truth and away from factual accuracy. Krieps plays in close-up with an inner life that owes nothing to earlier film and television Sissi material. Judith Kaufmann's photography of the Habsburg interiors gives the film one of the year's most distinctive looks, and Krieps's Un Certain Regard win at Cannes capped a year in which her work in Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread was being celebrated all over again in retrospectives.