The Nineteenth-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria is in every single place in Vienna: on chocolate containers, on bottles of rosé, on posters across the metropolis. The Greek antiques she collected are at Hermesvilla, on 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 tools are on show on the Hofburg, which was the monarchy’s central Vienna house.
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 along with her refusal to have her image taken after her early 30s, fuelled an air of secrecy round her.
Now, almost 125 years after Elisabeth’s assassination at age 60, two new productions — a brand new Netflix sequence referred to as The Empress and a movie referred to as Corsage, which debuted on the Cannes Movie Competition in Might and can hit American theaters Dec. 23 — supply their very own concepts.
“Rising up in Austria, she was the primary vacationer magnet, other than Mozart,” stated Marie Kreutzer, who wrote and directed Corsage. However, she added, Elisabeth, who was married to Emperor Franz Josef I, is essentially a thriller. “Her picture is one you possibly can reimagine and reinterpret and fill with your individual creativeness, as a result of we now have lots of tales about her, however you don’t know in the event that they’re true,” Kreutzer stated.
The moody, mental and beauty-obsessed empress has had many reincarnations.
Whereas alive, Elisabeth, who additionally glided by Sisi, traveled consistently, usually to Hungary, Greece and England, and was hardly ever 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 fashionable Greek, took heat baths in olive oil and wore leather-based masks stuffed 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 twenty years and wrote My Coronary heart Is Fabricated from Stone: The Darkish Aspect of the Empress Elisabeth, a e-book concerning the empress that impressed Corsage. “Folks didn’t see her, and she or he didn’t need to be seen,” Lindinger stated.
However, she was the empress of Austria and later the queen of Hungary, so she was extensively mentioned. “Regardless of how a lot she fled the eye and scrutiny and the court docket, she was at all times pursued,” stated Allison Pataki, who wrote two historic novels about Elisabeth, The Unintentional Empress and Sisi: Empress on Her Personal. “She was thrust into the highlight as this younger woman who was chosen by the emperor, largely due to her bodily magnificence.”
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 photos. Within the Twenties, a sequence of novels about her had been revealed, specializing in her love life.
In the course of 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 clothes and beloved by animals and other people 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 Warfare II and have stunning scenes of the countryside, clear-cut morals and a world untouched by battle.
“I grew up watching the Romy Schneider films in a campy method,” stated Katharina Eyssen, the present runner and head creator for The Empress, who’s from Bavaria, in southern Germany. As performed by Schneider, Elisabeth is “only a good-hearted woman that has no interior conflicts,” she stated.
Eyssen’s tackle Elizabeth, performed by Devrim Lingnau, is feistier, wilder and edgier than Schneider’s. The sequence opens shortly earlier than Elisabeth meets her future husband (and cousin), throughout his birthday celebrations in Unhealthy Ischl, Austria. Because 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.
The place Schneider’s eyes sparkle with pleasure and pleasure, Lingnau’s are heavier and sign a darker interior world.
Within the biographies Eyssen learn whereas growing the present, she stated, Elisabeth’s character is portrayed as “tough, fragile, nearly bipolar, melancholic.” However Eyssen didn’t totally purchase this angle. “There must be a inventive and passionate power; in any other case, she wouldn’t have survived that lengthy,” she stated.
A lot of what’s identified concerning the empress’s private life comes from her poems in addition to letters and written recollections from her kids, her ladies-in-waiting and her Greek tutor. “She’s a fantasy in so some ways,” Kreutzer stated. “It was a distinct time. There was no media as there may be in the present day. There are so few images 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. Photographs and work of her which are dated later are both retouched or composites. “She needed to remain within the reminiscence of the folks because the eternally younger 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 she or he weighs herself day by day (all true, in keeping 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 an actual torture instrument,” Krieps stated. “You possibly can’t breathe. You possibly can’t really feel. The ties are in your photo voltaic plexus, not in your waist.” She stated she nearly gave up on filming due to how depressing the corset made her.
Kreutzer additionally observed 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 grew to become barely impatient with the ladies engaged on it and the ladies who had been surrounding her and touching her,” she stated. “I do know now it was the bodily rigidity and ache that made her really feel unwell and act in a different way than I do know her to be. It was like her entering into the pores and skin of any person else.”
Having grown up on the Schneider movies, Krieps stated she felt as a youngster 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 via puberty, she stated, “immediately I had a sexuality, and my physique was at all times associated to this sexuality.” Later, as a mom, she stated, “my physique grew to become one thing like a jail,” and society anticipated her to be a wholly totally different particular person.
She started to see Elisabeth’s struggles along with her physique and the roles assigned to her as “a heightened model of one thing each lady experiences,” she stated.
The ultimate years of Elisabeth’s life have remained largely unexplored in common 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 melancholy grew to become deeper and extra everlasting. Whereas crusing on her yacht, Miramar, she would sit on the deck even in dangerous climate, her ever-present black-lace parasol her solely protection in opposition to the rain and breaking waves, in keeping with Sisi: Fable and Reality, by Katrin Unterreiner. As soon as, throughout a heavy storm, Elisabeth had herself tied to a chair above deck. In accordance with her Greek tutor, Constantin Christomanos, she stated, “I’m appearing like Odysseus as a result of the waves lure me.”
Pataki stated that all through her life, Elisabeth fought in opposition to the constricting function 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’m a sea gull from no land / I don’t name anybody seaside my house. / I’m not tied by anybody place, / I fly from wave to wave.”
In some methods, Pataki stated, Elisabeth might need felt extra snug in in the present day’s society than in Nineteenth-century Vienna. “Her main function and the expectation placed on her was, have sons, produce heirs,” Pataki stated. “However Sisi was very forward of her time in wanting extra for herself as a girl, a person, a spouse and a frontrunner.”