“Never forget, no matter bronchitis or headache, you are the Empress,” Vicky Krieps is told in “Corsage,” Marie Kreutzer’s fictionalized account of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The film accompanies the celebrated historical figure during the year she holidays across Europe, sticking a middle figure – figuratively and literally – to an institution that has dehumanized her since her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria at 16. Krieps is a mischievous, recalcitrant Elisabeth who is anything but an emperor’s docile wife. In “Corsage,” we witness her undergo a mid-life coming-of-age, unapologetically discovering who she is outside her designated roles as Empress, wife, mother, and spectacle.
We meet Elisabeth in
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