Corsage: Sissi like you've never seen her before [critique]

Marie Kreutzer revisits the figure of Sissi in a haughty gesture of never stifling modernity. And once again, Vicky Krieps is exceptional.

Released at the very end of 2022 in cinemas, Bodice arrives on television, unencrypted, this Friday evening. Visit Arte this evening or the channel’s website to (re)watch it in replay. First recommend it to you, especially if you like its main actress, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Threads, The Three Musketeers d'Artagnan And Milady).

It all starts from a sentence thrown by Vicky Krieps to Marie Kreutzer (her director of We used to be coolunpublished by us) “What if you made a film about Sissi with me? » An outstretched hand which the filmmaker immediately seized, seeing in it the opportunity to recount this past that we believe we know by heart, through rebroadcasts of the saga with Romy Schneider, to sign a work which is fully in line with our time, as certain diktats imposed on women have basically barely changed in 150 years.

Forgotten the obedient young monarch of Marischka's films, Empress Elisabeth is captured here at the turn of forty, at the moment when the work of representation to which she is required becomes an unbearable straitjacket. Her age and her weight, watched like milk on the stove, plunge her into neurosis, obsessed with the control of her body imposed on her by the dominant patriarchal morals. The polar opposite of a period film stifling under gilding, playing subtly with anachronisms (like the sound creation work, awarded at Cannes, surrounding Camille's superb soundtrack), Bodice embraces the desire for freedom of its rebellious heroine by throwing away the conventions expected of the biopic.

By revisiting her life, the filmmaker offers her the opportunity to posthumously taste what was forbidden to her, without anything appearing artificial, with a finesse that owes enormously to Vicky Krieps, capable in a look, in a pout, in a gesture of saying more and better than a thousand lines of dialogue. His explosive interiority constitutes a masterpiece of interpretation.

Trailer:

More than ever – Vicky Krieps: “Working with Emily Atef and Gaspard Ulliel was very intuitive”