Corsage is mesmerizingly sad

Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may have been, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say, the Princess Diana of her day. But then disaster strikes: she turns forty. I know, but in 1877 that is old. That is past it, for a woman. What purpose does she serve now?

This isn’t yet another film about a woman being done over by bad royals. It isn’t Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or Pablo Larrain’s Spencer. It’s more a take on celebrity culture and no longer being what is wanted. It’s mesmerizingly sad, and Vicky Krieps, who won the best actress award at Cannes, is superb.

The film, directed by Marie Kreutzer, is Austria’s entry to the Oscars and the first thing to say is that “corsage” here does not refer to a spray of flowers pinned to clothing. It’s used in the now-obsolete sense of the word, referring to the waist of a lady’s dress. If everything should feel a little too snug post-Christmas? That’s your corsage having its say, my friend. We first meet Elisabeth being laced into her corset and commanding: “Tighter, tighter, tighter.” As we see, she weighed herself constantly and, apparently, maintained a waist of sixteen inches all her life. I’ve just looked at that on a tape measure. It’s tiny. That measurement doesn’t even make it round my thigh. This may be why I’ve never been swept off my feet by a prince.

The film is not your regular cradle-to-grave narrative. Elisabeth, at sixteen, had been married off to Emperor Franz Joseph I, a man with mutton chops bigger than your head, but the movie focuses on just a couple of years around her fortieth birthday. “At the age of forty, a person dissolves and fades,” is how she puts it. The public idolize her, her waist and her hair, which was ankle length, and so elaborately braided it took three hours of hairdressing a day. She no longer wishes to be seen and has already mastered the art of the pretend-faint so that, on public occasions, she can be bundled away.

The story is told in a series of vignettes happening mostly in a series of lonely, chilly rooms that are sumptuous but always showing signs of decay. It’s where she meets the portrait painter whom she instructs simply to copy the paintings of her younger self. But also she loved to travel, to seek excitement, so we follow her to England, for instance, where she flirts with her horse-riding instructor. She needs to know: do I still have it?

The film builds cumulatively to form a complex portrait of a restless spirit whose job was to be appealing and who now finds herself disappearing. Krieps is intense yet sensitive. We sympathize with Elisabeth even if she is prickly and fierce and often not sympathetic. She increasingly withdraws, as Greta Garbo did, and Hedy Lamarr, and Joan Crawford. That’s what I thought of: all the beautiful women for whom life becomes impossible once beauty fades. “The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer,” as Joan Collins once famously said.

While the story has been fictionalized, the parts you will think most likely to be fiction aren’t. She did wear a veil at all times. She did have other women impersonate her so she could avoid official visits. She did shoot up heroin. Fascinatingly sad. Although it is sometimes too metaphor-heavy – the decaying rooms; the corsets so tight she can barely breathe – it has something to say about how we still judge women and it’s gorgeously photographed with exquisite costumes. It’s in cinemas on Friday. So you and your corsage could waddle along, perhaps?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.