Royalty and the pedestal-prison of womanhood is the theme of this new film from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, imagining the home life of the Hapsburg Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1877, the year of her 40th birthday. Like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Pablo Larraín’s Princess Diana, the kaiserin lives in a luxurious delirium of loneliness: notionally cherished, actually patronised.
The movie even shows the empress riding at the Northamptonshire estates of Diana’s ancestor, the fifth Earl Spencer – and enjoying there a capricious romantic flirtation with her riding instructor. It’s broadly historically accurate, though this doesn’t apply to the use of Help Me Make It Through the Night on the soundtrack or indeed Elizabeth’s encounter with later inventions such as cinema and heroin. But Kreutzer sees her political melancholy as part of the tension that led to the first world war.
Elizabeth is brilliantly played by Vicky Krieps as mysterious and sensual, imperious and severe: a woman of passions and discontents who faces icy distaste from the court and the family of her unfaithful husband Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister) – this is because of her sympathies for the Hungarian part of the Habsburg empire and her intimacy with the worldly Hungarian Count Andrássy (Tamás Lengyel). Snickering Viennese attendants and officials impugn her Austrian loyalties as they body-shame Elizabeth – every day she faces the literal and figurative struggle to fit into her corsage and get down to a terrifying 18 inches around the waist.
Elizabeth wears violet gowns, violet parasols, smokes violet cigarettes and distributes violet-scented chocolates to the unfortunates in hospitals and asylums. She only really smiles at the sight of her dogs and is utterly devastated when the horse that threw her has to be shot. When travelling incognito in Vienna (to spy on her husband’s mistress) she wears a dark veil – and requires an attendant to pose as her in this veil for a formal event while she is indoors shooting up. Later, she suffers the indignity of being congratulated on her atypical poise on this occasion.