52 Films by Women Vol 7. 22. CORSAGE (Director: Marie Kreutzer)
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...