Mesmerisingly sad: Corsage reviewed

Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may have been, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say, the Princess Diana of her day. But then disaster strikes: she turns 40. I know, but in 1877 that is old. That is past it, for a woman. What purpose does she serve now?

This isn’t yet another film about a woman being done over by bad royals. It isn’t Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or Pablo Larrain’s Spencer. It’s more a take on celebrity culture and no longer being what is wanted. It’s mesmerisingly sad, and Vicky Krieps, who won the best actress award at Cannes, is superb.

The film, directed by Marie Kreutzer, is Austria’s entry to the Oscars and the first thing to say is that ‘corsage’ here does not refer to a spray of flowers pinned to clothing. It’s used in the now-obsolete sense of the word, referring to the waist of a lady’s dress. If everything should feel a little too snug post-Christmas? That’s your corsage having its say, my friend. We first meet Elisabeth being laced into her corset and commanding: ‘Tighter, tighter, tighter.’ As we see, she weighed herself constantly and, apparently, maintained a waist of 16 inches all her life. I’ve just looked at that on a tape measure. It’s tiny. That measurement doesn’t even make it round my thigh. This may be why I’ve never been swept off my feet by a prince.

The film is not your regular cradle-to-grave narrative. Elisabeth, at 16, had been married off to Emperor Franz Joseph I, a man with mutton chops bigger than your head, but the movie focuses on just a couple of years around her 40th birthday.