★ 6 / 10
The danger with fictional accounts of the lives
CinemaSerf
The danger with fictional accounts of the lives of real people, is that it is frequently all to easy to poke holes in the plot. This is one such film that…
The danger with fictional accounts of the lives of real people, is that it is frequently all to easy to poke holes in the plot. This is one such film that takes just a little too much creative licence with the the life of the Empress Elisabeth (Vicky Krieps). Wife of the famed Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef (Florian Teichtmeister), this film follows a supposed year in the life of this curious historical figure who, having suffered a family tragedy and enduring a rather estranged emotional relationship with her husband, spends much of her life obsessing with her weight and seeking solitude. Krieps is on good form, she creates a persona for her character that is effective to watch, but the mixture of modern and period scenarios (old buildings with modern fire doors; a cross-channel ferry!) seems anachronistic - to what end? The buildings in which she and her family inhabit have none of the opulence and grandeur of the Hofburg or Prague Castle, indeed the British home of her horse-master "Bay" (Colin Morgan) looks little better that a ramshackle ruin - and this is incongruous with the way we know she lived her life. Reclusive, yes, but still in splendour. It is also a particularly unremarkable year in her life to have chosen to illustrate. Not the previous ones where turbulence within the Imperial family reigned, not the famed "Mayerling" period which was ultimately held responsible for the final decline of this lady. There is also an highly speculative portrayal of her relationship with Bavaria's equally famous King Ludwig II (Manuel Rubey) that adds little. The denouement itself is presented here in a rather too bizarre fashion that disappointingly topped off this interesting but frankly flat and pace-less drama that offers us a glimpse of this intriguing woman, but little more of substance. Pity.
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★ 4 / 10
Annoying Movie
boblipton
Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary (Vicky Krieps) blows out all the candles on her 40th birthday cake in 1878, and everyone tells her how young she looks.…
Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary (Vicky Krieps) blows out all the candles on her 40th birthday cake in 1878, and everyone tells her how young she looks. She doesn't feel young. At a time when half her female subjects wouldn't make it to her age, when she eats so little a wren would starve, and the maids are too weak to cinch her corset tight enough, she's grown bored with the court, bored with the pretty clothes. She takes frequent trips out of the country, like her journey to Britain, where she founders her favorite horse and Louis LePrince (Finnegan Oldfield) makes motion pictures using his new technology of a roll of film. She's had enough. So she takes the cross-Channel ferry back home...
Marie Kreutzer's film is an absolute mess of contradictions, full of deliberate anachronisms in technology and music, and ultimately offering a wide-ranging and contradictory series of conclusions. No, this is not the Empress Elizabeth portrayed by Romy Scheider in the Sissi trilogy. Yet once you've gotten past that point, what has this movie got to say, and whom is it saying it to? It's awful being a 40-year-old woman in 19th century Austria, even if you are the Empress? Ok. Is she mad, and can't get proper mental help? Ok. Is she deserving of our sympathy? A definite no to that, since she verbally abuses the servants, and as to what she does to Jeanne Werner....
So what is the point of a movie like this, other than to shoot in some beautiful settings, and get good performances out of fine actors? Is it to serve as a corrective to Ernst Marischka's spun-sugar take on the Empress? That came out seventy years ago. If the purpose is to tell a more truthful story, then why the insistence of untruthful details, like a harpist playing "Help Me Make It Through The Night"? Surely anyone interested enough in the life of a woman who was assassinated in 1898 would be as put off by the deliberately wrong details as I am.
I suppose the answer is that this movie was not made for me. It's true enough, but film is not an artistic medium in which the creators seek out a patron who will pay for everything. A film needs a mass audience, and that audience has to talk it up. For that last purpose, include me out.
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i read "fictional" and i can already assumed they created a fake story just to make women look good... pass