Corsage - Movie Review

Critics Score - 7

General Audience Score - 6

The royal family, patriarchy and monarchy of various countries has been the source of great fascination and obsession for countless generations. Since the invention of film and TV, this medium has provided a vehicle for countless stories of kings and queens from every corner of the globe and their myriads of exploits. This year we get a foreign language film in spoken German, as well as several others, called Corsage, which will be the Austrian submission to the Oscars for Best International Feature Film. It covers some months in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, played by the delightful Vicky Krieps, and is very much in the same vein as the myriad of other films and TV shows like The Crown and Elizabeth. While the film is enjoyable and interesting, it is also a bit long and the events in the life of the Empress are really not much different from the host of other shows you can cue up at a moment. Plenty of these, The Favourite and Victoria being among my personal favorites, are far more fascinating and engaging than this film, despite Krieps best efforts to keep us engaged. You could certainly do worse than spending an evening with the Austrian Dutchess, but you may find you’ll have to suck it up and suck it in a bit for this Corsage.

SYNOPSIS - This period piece begins in the late 1800’s in Austria, we watch as two maids stand over a bathtub, then we see the face of Empress Elisabeth (Vicky Krieps), she’s holding her nose as she’s submerged under the bath water. She emerges from the water and asks “How long?”, to which one of the servants replies “Forty”. Her maids help her tie up her corset before she gets dressed to make her way down and dine with some other prestigious gentleman. Afterwards she's outside where a royal procession of sorts is taking place, a choir of young boys is singing about the empire. Their harmonious voices rising and falling as her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister), takes her hand and leads her over to speak to a few men dressed in black. The men begin to speak to her, she stares back, blinking intermittently, her blank expression showing little signs of recognition before abruptly fainting, she falls down to the side and the men cluster around her. This is the point when Krieps performance begins to take center stage and effectively carries the film through the duration.

While Corsage itself is a bit bland in terms of the screenplay and dialogue, it offers most of the standard intrigue and drama that the royal lifestyles of the time would generate. But it can’t be undersold, Krieps performance is magnetic, it’s hard to take your eyes off her, the presence she brings to the screen is undeniable. She goes on in the next sequence to explain to one of her relatives the practice of fainting and they amusingly begins to imitate the practice of collapsing suddenly as they sit beside the fire. As the story slowly unfolds and we watch her interacting with her estranged husband, doing some horseback riding, then interacting a bit with her pre-teen daughter, a mind can begin to wonder where it’s all heading. But fortunately we finally get down to some business with the Empress celebrating her fortieth birthday party. This particular event is meant to serve as a sort of pivotal moment for her as many of the subplots and reasons for her behavior throughout the rest of the film hinge on her aging and her efforts to hold onto her youth and beauty. Like I mentioned, the film is interesting, but very methodical and deliberate in it’s pacing and it threatens to lose any of the audience that isn’t predisposed with interest in period pieces or royal family drama.

Corsage, despite it’s flaws, really does have quite a few things going for it, especially in some of it’s technical aspects. As is the case with so many period pieces, the costume design is pretty stellar, although most of the outfits she wears aren’t quite as memorable as the costumes in other films of the same caliber. The hair and makeup team behind the film also did some really impressive work and I could easily see this film making the Oscar’s short list for this and the previously mentioned costume categories. Also the production design was incredible, some of the homes and manors she visits aside from her own residence, the luxurious rooms and gardens, all were really impressive to behold. While the film isn’t extremely cinematic in some of it’s cinematography, a few of the shot compositions and camera angles used were inventive, but nothing I’ll be writing home about. Finally there’s Krieps, I’ll say it again, she’s the centerpiece of the film and if it wasn’t for her and her performance, this film would’ve really faltered. But she’s the glue holding this whole thing together, which she does perfectly well. It was the screenplay and story that left much to be desired, the same royal intrigue, who’s cheating on who, which royal wants to sleep with a family member, it’s more or less the same thing from every other period piece ever made involving individuals from a monarchy. The film is also a bit anticlimactic, I was hoping for some kind of Spencer-esque ending, with a sequence of cathartic release after a long somber and melancholic film, but alas, one was not to come. I also felt the editing and pacing could’ve been improved and the film could’ve picked up some momentum heading into the finale, but unfortunately it was all a bit underwhelming. In the end, the film is worth seeing, even if it’s just for Vicky, but I doubt this will be among anyone’s favorite films of the year, let alone period pieces.

SUMMARY - There’s certainly enough good things about Corsage that many critics can enjoy and general audiences can be somewhat entertained by. But the power of Vicky Krieps is undeniable, she brings enough life to Corsage to get us to the finish line, even if it’s forgotten soon after.