Corsage

Marie Kreutzer's Corsage opened at Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2022 and won Vicky Krieps the Best Performance prize. The film consolidated Kreutzer, an Austrian director previously best known for The Ground Beneath My Feet (2019), as a major figure in contemporary German-language cinema; Krieps's central performance was widely cited as one of the year's best, with the Best Actress nomination at the European Film Awards confirming the assessment.

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

The film deliberately refuses period-drama convention. Modern songs (including Camille's She Was) appear anachronistically on the soundtrack, telephones and other late-arriving technologies wander into the frame, and the historical record is altered for emotional rather than factual fidelity. Krieps performs in close-up with an interior register that has nothing to do with previous film and television Sissi material. Judith Kaufmann's photography of imperial-Habsburg interiors is among the year's most distinctive visual registers, and Krieps's Un Certain Regard win at Cannes capped a year that had already seen her acclaimed in Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread retrospective rounds.