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.
