Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Why do film directors, when dealing with historical subjects, stray from the truth? Usually, it is for commercial reasons. You take a real figure and imagine a romance that they never had in order to give a hook to your narrative. Emily , Frances O’Connor’s biopic of Emily Bront ë, is an example of this. Corsage , Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s fifth feature, does this to an extreme. The inference, at the end of the film, set between December 1877 and the autumn of 1878, is that its subject, Empress Elizabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, committed suicide by throwing herself from the prow of a ship, aged 40. In reality, Elizabeth lived until 1898, when she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. Kreutzer’s film doesn’t just feature one historical indiscretion. It imagines Elizabeth (Vicky Krieps), known affectionately as Sisi, meeting the father of cinema, Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield), in Northumberland in the spring of 1878. She then becomes the subject of...

  How many Austrian comedies can you name? Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t count. A google search did yield one curiosity, The Unfish , a 1997 film by Robert Dornhelm about a young woman who discovers that whoever sleeps with her in the body of a preserved whale will be granted one wish. I know what that wish will be – a bed from IKEA. The point is that Austria is not known for its sense of humour. It is practically a lachenfrei zone. This makes writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s comedy, Was hat uns bloß so ruinert ( We Used To Be Cool ) so unusual. It doesn’t exactly tear down the stereotype but when you see one of the characters ride a bicycle at the same time as trying to pull a suitcase, you appreciate the effort. We Used To Be Cool will put you in mind of TV series like Thirtysomething and Cold Feet or films such as What to Expect When You’re Expecting . It is about three couples who become parents at the same time. One pair, Ines (Pia Hierzegger) and Chris (Manuel Rubey) spl...