The Nineteenth-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria is all over the place in Vienna: on chocolate containers, on bottles of rosé, on posters across the metropolis. The Greek antiques she collected are at Hermesvilla, on the town outskirts; her hearse is at Schönbrunn Palace, the previous summer season residence of the Habsburg royal household; and her cocaine syringe and health club gear are on show on the Hofburg, which was the monarchy’s central Vienna dwelling.
These traces paint an attractive, however incomplete, image of an empress who receded from public life not lengthy after getting into it and spent most of her time touring the world to keep away from her personal court docket. She had a tattoo on her shoulder, drank wine with breakfast and exercised two to 3 occasions a day on wall bars and rings in her rooms. These eccentricities, mixed together with her refusal to have her image taken after her early 30s, fuelled an charisma round her.
Now, almost 125 years after Elisabeth’s assassination at age 60, two new productions — a brand new Netflix collection referred to as The Empress and a movie referred to as Corsage, which debuted on the Cannes Film Festival in May and can hit American theaters Dec. 23 — provide their very own concepts.
“Growing up in Austria, she was the main tourist magnet, aside from Mozart,” stated Marie Kreutzer, who wrote and directed Corsage. Nevertheless, she added, Elisabeth, who was married to Emperor Franz Josef I, is essentially a thriller. “Her image is one you can reimagine and reinterpret and fill with your own imagination, because we have a lot of stories about her, but you don’t know if they’re true,” Kreutzer stated.
The moody, mental and beauty-obsessed empress has had many reincarnations.
While alive, Elisabeth, who additionally glided by Sisi, traveled continually, usually to Hungary, Greece and England, and was not often seen by the Viennese public. In non-public, she wrote poetry, rode horses and hunted, hiked excessive into the Alps, learn Shakespeare, studied classical and trendy Greek, took heat baths in olive oil and wore leather-based masks crammed with uncooked veal as a part of her skin-care routine.
“She was such a recluse,” stated Michaela Lindinger, a curator on the Wien Museum, who has studied Elisabeth for greater than 20 years and wrote My Heart Is Made of Stone: The Dark Side of the Empress Elisabeth, a ebook in regards to the empress that impressed Corsage. “People didn’t see her, and she didn’t want to be seen,” Lindinger stated.
Nevertheless, she was the empress of Austria and later the queen of Hungary, so she was extensively mentioned. “No matter how much she fled the attention and scrutiny and the court, she was always pursued,” stated Allison Pataki, who wrote two historic novels about Elisabeth, The Accidental Empress and Sisi: Empress on Her Own. “She was thrust into the spotlight as this young girl who was chosen by the emperor, in large part because of her physical beauty.”
After Elisabeth was killed by an anarchist in Switzerland in 1898, she grew to become an object of fascination all through the Habsburg Empire, and her picture appeared on commemorative cash and in memorial footage. In the Twenties, a collection of novels about her had been revealed, specializing in her love life.
During the Nineteen Fifties, the Sissi movie trilogy, starring Romy Schneider, revived Elisabeth as a happy-go-lucky Disney princess come to life, clad in bouncy pastel attire and beloved by animals and folks alike. The syrupy movies, which seem on German and Austrian TV screens each Christmas, are a part of the Heimatfilm style, which emerged within the German-speaking world after World War II and have lovely scenes of the countryside, clear-cut morals and a world untouched by battle.
“I grew up watching the Romy Schneider movies in a campy way,” stated Katharina Eyssen, the present runner and head writer for The Empress, who’s from Bavaria, in southern Germany. As performed by Schneider, Elisabeth is “just a good-hearted girl that has no inner conflicts,” she stated.
Eyssen’s tackle Elizabeth, performed by Devrim Lingnau, is feistier, wilder and edgier than Schneider’s. The collection opens shortly earlier than Elisabeth meets her future husband (and cousin), throughout his birthday celebrations in Bad Ischl, Austria. As the story goes, Franz Josef was anticipated to suggest to Elisabeth’s older sister, Duchess Helene in Bavaria, however he modified his thoughts as soon as he noticed Elisabeth.
Where Schneider’s eyes sparkle with pleasure and pleasure, Lingnau’s are heavier and sign a darker inside world.
In the biographies Eyssen learn whereas growing the present, she stated, Elisabeth’s character is portrayed as “difficult, fragile, almost bipolar, melancholic.” But Eyssen didn’t absolutely purchase this attitude. “There has to be a creative and passionate force; otherwise, she wouldn’t have survived that long,” she stated.
Much of what’s identified in regards to the empress’s private life comes from her poems in addition to letters and written recollections from her youngsters, her ladies-in-waiting and her Greek tutor. “She’s a myth in so many ways,” Kreutzer stated. “It was a different time. There was no media as there is today. There are so few photographs of her.”
After her early 30s, Elisabeth refused to have her image taken, and the final time she sat for a portray was at age 42. Photos and work of her which might be dated later are both retouched or composites. “She wanted to stay in the memory of the people as the eternally young queen,” Lindinger stated.
Corsage goes additional than The Empress down the darkish pathways of Elisabeth’s character, providing a punk-gothic portrait of the empress at 40 as a deeply troubled soul who grasps for levity and freedom within the stifling environment of the Habsburg court docket. She smokes, she is obsessive about train and the ocean, and he or she weighs herself day by day (all true, in accordance with historians).
The title of the film, in German, interprets as “corset.” Famously, Elisabeth maintained a 50-centimeter waistline all through her life.
Kreutzer and Vicky Krieps, who stars as Elisabeth, determined that, for the sake of authenticity, Krieps would put on a corset just like the empress’s throughout filming.
“It’s a real torture instrument,” Krieps stated. “You can’t breathe. You can’t feel. The ties are on your solar plexus, not on your waist.” She stated she virtually gave up on filming due to how depressing the corset made her.
Kreutzer additionally seen a change in Krieps, with whom she had labored on one other film a number of years earlier, that started throughout one of many first fittings.
“She became slightly impatient with the women working on it and the women who were surrounding her and touching her,” she stated. “I know now it was the physical tension and pain that made her feel unwell and act differently than I know her to be. It was like her getting into the skin of somebody else.”
Having grown up on the Schneider movies, Krieps stated she felt as a teen that there was one thing darker within the empress that was being shielded from view, and began to narrate to the entrapment she imagined Elisabeth had felt throughout her life.
After Krieps went by way of puberty, she stated, “suddenly I had a sexuality, and my body was always related to this sexuality.” Later, as a mom, she stated, “my body became something like a prison,” and society anticipated her to be a completely totally different individual.
She started to see Elisabeth’s struggles together with her physique and the roles assigned to her as “a heightened version of something every woman experiences,” she stated.
The remaining years of Elisabeth’s life have remained largely unexplored in standard tradition. (Corsage takes creative liberties with the portrayal of her loss of life.) After Elisabeth’s solely son, Crown Prince Rudolf, killed himself in 1889, her long-standing despair grew to become deeper and extra everlasting. While crusing on her yacht, Miramar, she would sit on the deck even in unhealthy climate, her ever-present black-lace parasol her solely protection in opposition to the rain and breaking waves, in accordance with Sisi: Myth and Truth, by Katrin Unterreiner. Once, throughout a heavy storm, Elisabeth had herself tied to a chair above deck. According to her Greek tutor, Constantin Christomanos, she stated, “I am acting like Odysseus because the waves lure me.”
Pataki stated that all through her life, Elisabeth fought in opposition to the constricting position of being an empress. From her poems, mental pursuits and travels, it seems as if Elisabeth was at all times trying outward, imagining herself anyplace however the place she was. In a poem from 1880, she gave a touch of what she might need been pondering throughout on a regular basis she spent on the deck of the Miramar: “I am a sea gull from no land / I do not call any one beach my home. / I am not tied by any one place, / I fly from wave to wave.”
In some methods, Pataki stated, Elisabeth might need felt extra snug in at present’s society than in Nineteenth-century Vienna. “Her primary role and the expectation put on her was, have sons, produce heirs,” Pataki stated. “But Sisi was very ahead of her time in wanting more for herself as a woman, an individual, a wife and a leader.”
