Corsage

[osprey_archer]

At Heartland Film Festival, it’s become something of a tradition that the audience claps at the end of each feature. I’m not sure how this started - maybe as a courtesy because the filmmakers show up at so many of the features? - but it’s a nice tradition, and I always clap too, even at movies like The Country Club that I didn’t like so much.

It is therefore meaningful that at the end of Corsage, no one in the theater clapped. Possibly we were all shell-shocked.

Corsage is loosely based on the life of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, also known as Sisi, famously one of the most beautiful women in 19th century Europe. She was obsessed with her appearance and practiced an extensive diet and exercise regime long before that was common. She was also accused of tight-lacing her corset; corsage is corset in German, and no, I don’t know why they didn’t translate the title. I personally am not wild about movies that are about women obsessed with the ~horror of growing older~ but at least this part is based on fact.

In the movie, the year is 1878, and Sisi has just turned forty. She fears losing her beauty, she’s bored of court life, and about halfway through she decides that the way out is to kill herself. She jumps out the window of her fencing salon, contemplates how to hang herself, and ultimately trains one of her ladies-in-waiting to impersonate her, while Sisi herself jumps off a ship to her death.

Also, at some point a random guy shows up with a movie camera (ten years before movie cameras were invented) and films Sisi.

In real life, Sisi lived till 1898 and died when she was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. I’m absolutely baffled why the filmmakers had her jump off a boat twenty years early. Why not have her live out her full life span, in which case you could bring in a no-longer-anachronistic movie camera? Or focus the movie on the year Sisi turned forty and just not have her die at the end?

Also absolutely baffled that this movie is apparently getting awards buzz. That’s why I decided to see it, in fact: “I’ll get in on the ground floor, like with Portrait of a Lady on Fire!” Well, I got what I deserved for seeing a movie for such an ignominious reason.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Wow, that's nuts. What did the director/filmmakers think they were doing? Was it supposed to be a commentary on being obsessed with youth and beauty? Because much as I dislike women being obsessed with those things, I dislike criticizing them for it even more, seeing as it was a main way they were valued by society at the time (and, sadly, continue to be even now, though there are other avenues for showing your worth). And so they find a real-life woman who was obsessed with those things, but her life isn't edgy and extreme enough, so they ramp it up with a suicide? COME ON. Make up a person, then. Because it sure does seem significant that in fact this woman ***didn't*** commit suicide. She had to live to the shock-horror old age of 60! So how did she handle that? There's be a more meaningful movie in that.

[osprey_archer]

My perhaps mean-spirited feeling is that the filmmakers share Sisi's horror about women growing old and therefore couldn't bear to make a movie about a sixty-year-old woman. They're trying to comment on being obsessed with youth and beauty but accidentally just replicating those attitudes.

Obsession-with-youth-and-beauty is one of those things that is very hard to comment on directly, anyway. The most effective commentary is a character like Jessica Fletcher who is sixty years old and living her best life.

[asakiyume]

Amen to that about Jessica Fletcher!

I can understand being 24 or 34 and not wanting to ~ ~look like ~ ~ Jessica Fletcher. But a life *doing* things is just so much more full and fun than a life where all you are is an object to be admired.

[osprey_archer]

I think there's definitely something to be said for enjoying each age of your life where it's at! No need to speed-run being Jessica Fletcher when you are 24. But worth thinking about living in a way that your life can be as full and happy as Jessica Fletcher's when you reach that point.