Vienna — 19th-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria is everywhere in Vienna. A box of chocolates, a bottle of rosé, posters around town. Her collection of Greek antiquities can be found in Hermes Villa on the outskirts of the city. Her hearse is at Schönbrunn Palace, the former summer residence of the Habsburg royal family. Her cocaine syringes and gym equipment are on display at the Hofburg Palace, which was the central Vienna home of the monarchy.
These vestiges paint a charming but incomplete picture of the Empress, who retired shortly after entering public life and spent most of her time traveling around the world to avoid her own court. She had a tattoo on her shoulder. She drank wine with breakfast. She exercised with bars and rings on the walls of her room two to three times a day, these eccentricities, combined with her refusal to take pictures of her after her early thirties I blew a mysterious air into.
Nearly 125 years after Elizabeth’s assassination, and now at the age of 60, two new works have been produced.Empressand the movie “”corsage‘, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May and hits American theaters on December 23, offers an original idea.
“Growing up in Austria, she was the main tourist attraction, apart from Mozart,” said Marie Kreutzer, who wrote and directed “Corsage.” Nevertheless, Elisabeth, who was married to Emperor Franz Joseph I, remains largely a mystery. Because we have a lot of stories about her, but we don’t know if they’re true,” Kreutzer said.
Moody, intelligent and beauty-obsessed, the Empress has been reincarnated many times.
During her lifetime, Elisabeth, also known as “Sisi”, traveled frequently to Hungary, Greece and England and was rarely seen by the general public of Vienna. In her private life, she writes poetry, hunts on horseback, hikes high in the Alps, reads Shakespeare, learns classical and modern Greek, takes hot baths in olive oil, and eats raw veal. I wore a leather mask stuffed with this as part of my skincare routine.
“She was such a recluse,” said Michaela Lindinger, curator of the Vienna Museum, who has studied Elisabeth for more than two decades and writes:My Heart Is Made of Stone: The Dark Side of Empress Elisabeth”, a book about the Empress that inspired “Corsage”. “People didn’t see her and she didn’t want to be seen,” Lindinger said.
Nevertheless, as she was Empress of Austria and later Queen of Hungary, she was widely discussed. I was always being chased,” he wrote. two historical novels Elisabeth, on ‘The Accidental Empress’ and ‘Sisi: Empress on Her Own’. “It was her physical beauty that brought her into the spotlight as the girl chosen by her emperor.”
After Elisabeth was murdered by anarchists in Switzerland in 1898, she came to prominence throughout the Habsburg Empire and her likeness appeared on commemorative coins and photographs. The 1920s saw the publication of a series of novels focusing on her love life.
In the 1950s, The movie “Sissy” trilogystarring Romy Schneider brings Elizabeth back to life as a feisty Disney princess. Wearing a bouncy pastel dress in her colors, she is loved by animals and people alike. Syrup films, which appear on television screens in Germany and Austria each Christmas, are part of the “high-matt film” genre that emerged in German-speaking countries after World War II, featuring beautiful scenes of the countryside, clear morals A world of constant conflict.
“I grew up watching Romy Schneider’s films in a pompous way,” said Katarina Eisen, showrunner from southern Germany’s Bavaria and lead author of The Empress. . Elisabeth, played by Schneider, is “just a heartfelt girl with no conflicts,” she said.
Eisen’s take on Elizabeth, played by Devrim Ringnau in “The Empress,” is spirited, wilder, and edgier than Schneider’s. The series begins during her birthday celebrations in Bad Ischl, Austria, just before Elisabeth meets her future husband (and cousin). As the story goes, Franz Joseph was expected to propose to Duchess Helen, Elisabeth’s older sister of Bavaria, but after seeing Elisabeth he changed her mind.
Schneider’s eyes glow with joy and excitement, while Ringnau’s eyes reveal a heavier, darker inner world.
In the biography Eyssen read during the making of the show, Elizabeth’s character was portrayed as “difficult, fragile, almost bipolar, and melancholic”. . “Without her creative and passionate energy, she wouldn’t have survived so long.
Much of what is known about the Empress’ private life comes from her poems, letters, letters and memoirs from her children, her maids-in-waiting, and her Greek tutor. “She’s a myth in many ways,” Kreutzer said. “It was a different era back then, there was no media like there is today. There are very few pictures of her.”
Since her early thirties, Elisabeth refused to be photographed and last painted at age 42. Her photographs and drawings in her later years are either retouched or synthetic. “She wanted to be remembered as a young queen forever,” Lindinger said.
‘Corsage’ offers a 40-year-old punk-gothic portrait of the Empress as a deeply troubled soul grasping for lightness and freedom in the stuffy atmosphere of the Habsburg court, taking the darker path of Elisabeth’s character more than ‘The Empress’. Going further. She smokes, is obsessed with exercise and the ocean, and weighs her daily (all true, according to historians).
The film’s title translates to “corset” in German. Famously, Elizabeth maintained a 50-centimeter waistline throughout her life.
Kreutzer and Vicki Krieps, who star as Elizabeth, decided that for authenticity, Kriebs would wear an empress-like corset during filming.
“It’s a real torture device,” Creeps said. “I can’t breathe, I can’t feel it. The tie is in my solar plexus, not my waist.” She said she nearly gave up filming her because of how miserable the corset made her.
Kreutzer also noticed a change in Krieps, who he had worked with on another film a few years earlier.
“She got a little impatient with the women working and the women surrounding her and touching her,” she said. “I now know that it was the physical strain and pain that made her unwell and acted differently than I knew her. She knew she was someone else.” It was like getting into the skin of
Growing up on Romy Schneider’s films, Krieps imagined that as a teenager he sensed that the Empress had something dark hidden in plain sight, and that Elisabeth felt it while she was alive. He said he started getting involved in confinement.
After Clipse hit puberty, she said, “Suddenly I had sexuality and my body was always associated with this sexuality.” Then, as her mother, she said, “My body became like a prison,” and society expected her to be a completely different person.
She began to see the conflict between Elizabeth’s body and the roles assigned to her as “an enhanced version of what all women go through,” she said.
The final years of Elizabeth’s life remained largely unexplored in popular culture. Her long-standing depression became deeper and more permanent after she committed suicide in 1889. We sat on the deck even in bad weather. The ever-present black lace parasol was our only defense against rain and crashing waves. Once, during a violent storm, she was tied to a chair on the deck.
The novelist Pataki said that throughout her life, Elizabeth struggled with her restrictive role as Empress. It looks like you are imagining the location of In one of her poems from 1880, she hints at what she was thinking during all the time she spent on the deck of the Miramar. / I’m bound nowhere / I fly from wave to wave.
In some ways, Pataki said, she may have felt more comfortable in today’s society than in 19th-century Vienna. “Her main role and the expectations placed on her were to bear her son and produce an heir,” said Pataki. “But Sisi was way ahead of her time in that she wanted more for herself as a woman, as an individual, as a wife, and as a leader. “