Corsage

Vicky Krieps, who stole the show from Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017) makes the most out of her plumb leading role in Marie Kreutzer’s historical costume drama Corsage. Kreutzer is the latest filmmaker to tell the story of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, though her version is far cheekier than previous screen incarnations. Renowned for her beauty and responsible for launching fashion trends of the late 1980s, Elisabeth was famous for extensive and obsessive beauty regiments, long periods of fasting, and eschewing the front-laced courses of the day in favor of far more restrictive tight-laced foundation garments. The metaphor is not employed in as oppressive a fashion as the underthings themselves.

The film begins around the time the Empress turns forty, the age at which she states “a person begins to disperse and fade,” and chronicles her various attempts at freeing herself from the many imposed and self-imposed constraints of her age, station, era, and, most of all, gender. Like Sofia Coppola’s new wave take on Marie Antoinette (2006), Kreutzer's movie mixes playfully impertinent anachronisms into the often stuffy historical drama genre. Krieps's Elisabeth conducts her affairs with brazenly modern attitudes and behaviours that resonate with contemporary viewers in a "that's how I would feel (or act, or think, or behave)" manner. Neither filmmaker nor star overdoes this mixing of past-tense story with present-day storytelling so the result is a satisfying picture that, while it doesn't upend or revolutionize the way we look back at Empress Elisabeth's era, still provides food for thought. I knew this blending of time periods was working perfectly during a scene in which a harpist plays the Rolling Stones' tune “As Tears Go By" and its Baroque melody sounded so correct for the period I actually had to stay through the full end titles to check the Jagger/Richards/Oldham writing credit just to be sure.