The Sisi boom continues: The Riot Girl from Habsburg

The laces tighten with a jerk and force the body into a corset. Another appraising look, and then the package is tied. That’s how Marie Kreutzer’s Sisi film began last year, which also has the appropriate title: “Corsage”. An almost too obvious metaphor for the conditions at the Austro-Hungarian court, but what image hasn’t been used in the historicization of Empress Elisabeth, who was assassinated 125 years ago?

Pop culture continued to embellish this myth, eventually embracing it in the series The Crown… but wait, that was the story of another tragic figure at the royal court. In medialisation, the biographies of Elisabeth and Diana have recently converged more and more – possibly the fate of modern royal heroine stories.

Well tied up at court

The scene with the corsage also crept into the most recent Elisabeth film; there seems to be no getting around this picture. Except that in “Sisi & Me” Frauke Finsterwalder not only changes the perspective of the courtly rituals of our favorite empress in the title – the tied woman has also changed roles. Irma Countess von Sztáray (Sandra Hüller) is being prepared for clearance by her domineering mother (Sibylle Canonica), the cheerless teenage girl is supposed to audition for a post as governess with Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary.

There, the candidate first has to undergo a degradingly funny aptitude test. The empress, played by Susanne Wolff with visible fun in loving spite, rules at court with laissez-faire, but maintains a strict fitness regime: sprints and hurdles in a corset, cocaine diet for breakfast.

The timing for “Sisi & Ich” could not be more unfortunate – as a later offshoot of a short anniversary wave with two feature films and series about the recalcitrant empress and new feminist icon. But also as a latecomer to a veritable streaming boom of “revisionist” historical dramas from “Dickinson” to “Bridgerton” with their pop references, Spotify playlists and queer-feminist PoC occupations. Whereby Finsterwalder gets stuck in the last point halfway at “4 blocks”: In “Sisi & Ich” the Arab is again just the one who slips a chunk of hashish to Elisabeth and Irma.

Coachella Biedermeier

“Sisi & I” is coming to the cinemas at a time when one was almost a little relieved that in the current Sisi hype we were spared a Habsburg “Marie Antoinette” makeover. There are no Chucks lying around in Sisi’s closet, but a Coke bottle has a cameo. Wolff’s Sisi differs from her predecessors mainly in the sound. The ironic snobbery of the better off is known from the pen of Finsterwalder’s co-author and husband Christian Kracht. “Only the bourgeoisie are ashamed,” Sisi once said to Aunt Irma.

The “Sound of Habsburg” from Portishead’s trip-hop to the riot-grrrl-punk of Le Tigre (yes, Finsterwalder is a child of the nineties), on the other hand, sounds a bit deliberate, but fashionably fits perfectly with the ruffled Coachella Biedermeier and striped sweater minimalism of Tanja Hausner’s costumes. And although “Sisi & Ich” is nominally about the adoring perspective, the amorous look of Irma, a stunning Susanne Wolff takes over the show most of the time.

Finsterwalder frees himself from the corset of the Sisi myth by moving the story from stuffy Vienna to sun-drenched Corfu. In her summer residence, Sisi has built a testosterone-free, proto-bourgeois utopia where brother-in-law Viktor (Georg Friedrich) can also act out his homoerotic fantasies. “I always have to think of tablecloths when I talk to men,” Irma says, slightly piqued. Only one would have wished for this emancipation idyll to be much more consistent at the end; but not back to the melancholic Romy-Schneider-Sisi. (Or in soundtrack logic: more Le Tigre instead of Nico.) But from the point of view of an empress, freedom is also a bourgeois privilege.

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