“Sisi” – film and television in search of the true Austrian empress
We Germans have been extremely devoted to Austria’s most famous cinema and TV monarch for 68 years now. There is only one true “Sisi” across generations – Romy Schneider.
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As soon as the heroine in Ernst Marischka’s three-part cinema cuteness (from 1955 to 1957) rides in a red dress on her steed Gretl across a screen and gives the fawn the milk bottle – usually she does this at Christmas time – the viewer’s heart reliably becomes a quiet lake. Now, from September 29, a new Sisi is trying her luck in the Netflix series “The Empress”. Will she succeed in the coup?
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The real Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary (1819-1898), assassinated by an Italian anarchist, was largely different from her media brand, shaped by Marischka and the increasingly unwilling Schneider. The Munich-born Wittelsbacherin, who married her cousin Franz-Joseph as a 16-year-old teenager (like in the films, it was probably love at first sight), was not d’ Accordance.
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But at the latest with the death of her two-year-old daughter Sophie, the time of pain and fear, of depression, the result of self-knowledge, rebellion and emancipation, began.
The life of the real Sisi was more contradictory
The historian Martina Winkelhofer described the development in 2021 in her two-volume biography “Sisi’s Way”, a must for anyone interested in Elisabeth’s life. Here you can read that Sisi (the correct spelling of Elisabeth’s nickname) was a fitness junkie, practiced manic physical culture and, as one of the best horsewomen in Europe, preferred to travel on horses than to devote herself to her son, the heir to the throne Rudolf.
The fact that the empress, who was increasingly averse to the monarchy, fought for freedom by threatening to separate from Franz-Joseph could be just as alienating for Sisi romantics as her cocaine consumption or the anchor tattoo she had tattooed on her shoulder. The fact that she earmarked the proceeds from the Swiss publication of her poems for “children of the politically persecuted” appears to be an almost subversive act against the oppressive Habsburg state.
Sisi’s life, as Winkelhofer tells us, was exciting, the empress contradictory, progressive and self-centered. No – Sisi was not a fighter against the oppression of women, not a liberator of her people. In any case, her life provides Netflix with material for several seasons of her series “The Empress” (starting September 29), which could top the previous media portrayal of Sisi.
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Little edifying: A ZDF two-parter and an animated film
So far there have been productions of different grades to report. In any case, it was nothing with a calm lake when the Italian actress Cristiana Capotondi wanted to instill something resistant in the young empress in the two-part ZDF remake “Sisi” in 2009. Sisi and Emperor Franz-Joseph (David Rott) languished at the same time with dialogues that shamed every drawing board, as if one wanted to show Ernst Marischka posthumously what real kitsch is. Oh yes, Martina Gedeck was worth seeing as Sisi’s icy strong mother-in-law Sophie.
Two years earlier, when Bully Herbig had bestowed his sparse CGI spot on Empress Elisabeth in the animated film “Lissi und der wilde Kaiser” (2007), nobody was “amused”. Alleged trick specialists from Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” remake (2005) are working on the animation of the Manitu shoemaker, but there was no guest appearance by the eight-meter gorilla king at Kaisers. But that of a pixel yeti. Who slipped into an ice crevice and was enlisted by the Himalayan Frost Devil in exchange for lifesaving to hand him the Empress (who kind of looked like Herbig).
works differently and the historiography of entertainment knows nothing about all this anyway. Elisabeth and Franz-Joseph shouted at each other with their happy drunkenness: “Franz!!!” – “Lissi!!!” Even comedy fans found it more strange than funny.
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Worth seeing: The Sisis by Dominique Devenport and Vicky Krieps
A more interesting Sisi could be seen in an RTL series last year. Here she was fresh, cheeky and equipped with a curiosity for the physical with that went beyond Romy Schneider’s amorous smile, being hugged and chaste kisses. As an erotically interested royal, Dominique Devenport dives into the depths of his own libido with the help of maid Fanny and a dildo, and the spoken word about it was contemporary.
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As the imperial spouse, Jannik Schumann was someone who was to benefit from Elisabeth’s “studies”, but was also very much concerned with the problems between Austria and Hungary. More Eros, more politics – it didn’t have the class of Netflix’s Brit Royals series “The Crown”, but brought a good rating of 13 percent for RTL at Christmas time 2021 – a second season is in the making.
So far, the most impressive of all Sisis of the moving image is probably the wonderful Vicky Krieps in the film “Corsage” by the Austrian director Marie Kreutzer (theatrical release was July 2022). Krieps is an overwhelming Sisi who, as an almost 40-year-old empress, finds life at court insipid and leaves a dinner party with the finger, which was unknown at the time. The husband is unfaithful, a distinctive Hungarian comforts.
Krieps’ Sisi – who does not keep quiet about her insubordinate sympathies for Habsburg Hungary – is as lonely in luxury and glamor as Kristen Stewart’s Princess Diana in Pablo Larrain’s biopic “Spencer” was six months earlier. Addiction to sports, obsession with health, the desire for an eternal wasp waist – there is a melancholy in this film that turns the viewer’s heart into an icy sea.
Is “The Empress” a Sisi series at a high level?
And now Netflix wants to know too. Devrim Lingnau (“Auerhaus”) will be the newest successor to Romy in the initially six-part series “The Empress”. It would be even better if the image of a woman determined by others finding herself would be superimposed on the old kitsch image of Marischka and the story of a modern, liberating woman in an encrusted society would be told. A celebrity who stages himself and who is later appropriated by the mass media that was emerging at the time. There is potentially a lot of present in the “Sissi” story. Maybe there is also a series hit on a high level.
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“The Empress” isn’t the end either: the two “Sisi” novels “The Accidental Empress” (2015) and “Sisi, Empress on Her Own” (2016) by the American author Allison Pataki are to become a historical drama series in the USA be – in the end, however, it was still about this project. And in spring 2023, Frauke Finsterwalder’s film “Sisi & I” will be released in cinemas, in which the life of the empress (Susanne Wolff) is to be told from the perspective of the lady-in-waiting Irma (Sandra Hüller). Habsburg without end.
The Sisi hype has not only existed since Romy Schneider’s films
Incidentally, Emperor Franz-Joseph himself laid the foundation for the endless hype surrounding Sisi. After his wife in Geneva was attacked by the Italian Luigi Lucheni with such a thinly pointed file that the attacked woman initially did not even notice the fatal stab in the heart and walked on for ten minutes before collapsing (actually the assassin had the French prince Philippe d’Orléans want to murder), the widower made sure that his dead wife was iconized so that he had the court chapel decorated as a Sisi memorial. Books, plays, revues about the empress were already published in the 1910s.
The director Josef von Sternberg (“The Blue Angel” with Marlene Dietrich), who was born in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, then made the first Sisi film with “The King Steps Out” in 1936, and the little-known Grace Moore from Tennessee became the first Sisi of film history. Ironically, the Singspiel never reached the cinemas of Austria or (Nazi) Germany.
Romy Schneider tried again in 1973 with Sisi
With Luchino Visconti’s segment of the seduction comedy “Bocaccio 70” (1962), Romy Schneider, the super “Sisi”, freed herself from the corsage of the royal German-Austrian film twink and became the most sensual woman in European cinema and a great actress. “I had to get out of the straitjacket she put me in,” she said in an interview at the time. 16 years after “Sissi – Fateful Years of an Empress” (1957), Schneider then had the opportunity to use the economic miracle Sisi picture in “Ludwig II”. (1973) – a role she only took on to please Visconti.
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“There are no similarities between the Sisi of yesteryear and my role today,” she said at the time. But had doubts about the success of a new interpretation: “Whether I like it or not, the Sisi imprint, which I have fought so hard, will weigh heavily on my favorite, my Elizabeth truthfully represent.”
The Schneider-Sisi then appeared cynical and disillusioned in the 1970s, and to this day – on a par with Krieps (and Hannah Herzsprung in “Ludwig II.” from 2012) – is probably the best portrayal of the historical figure. Only in a single scene did a diadem in Schneider’s hair allow memories of the old Sisi glamour, which the actress was so tired of.
That was not enough for a new potential favorite German Christmas Sisi film.