Three more Vicky Krieps movies
The Luxumborgian actress specializes in strong-willed, somewhat mad women in "Phantom Thread" (2017), "Hold Me Tight" (2021), and "Corsage" (2022)
Phantom Thread (2017), written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Hold Me Tight (2021), directed by Mathieu Amalric
Corsage (2022), written and directed by Marie Kreutzer
Sometime about twenty minutes into “Phantom Thread,” a melodrama about a domineering dress designer and the women in his life, a small conflict arises between Reynolds, the dressmaker, and Alma, very recently just a waitress in a seaside town — it’s England in the mid-to-late 1950s — who is in the process of becoming his latest model, muse, and lover. She is standing in one of his creations which, judging by the dozen or so gowns we’ve already seen, is one of Reynolds’ stodgier and less elegant creations.
Reynolds (Daniel Day-Lewis) asks Alma why she is acting grumpy. She replies that the dress doesn’t feel right; it’s the fabric — which to this viewer’s untrained eye did look heavy, somewhat brocade-like, and unflattering.
Cyril (Lesley Manville), Reynolds’ older sister and business partner, who strives to protect him from anything that might bog him down in the slightest, informs Alma that the fabric is exactly what their firm’s high-society clients prefer. Reynolds himself adds that Alma “might someday develop taste” but that her opinion currently is worth nothing at all: “You have no taste,” he concludes. “Maybe I want to keep my own taste,” Alma pouts, almost soto voce. But Reynolds won’t suffer any backtalk and roughly silences her.
The dynamic in their relationship is thus established: He might clothe her in gorgeous gowns and admire her radiance, which seems to him to be his own creation, but her self will be inviolable no matter how domineering Reynolds and his sister are.
That quiet assertion of self is key for the character of Alma, and for actress Vicky Krieps, who in each of the three roles considered here maintains an independent spirit, just as her character does in the Viggo Mortensen western “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” now in select theaters. The difference between her indomitable role in the western and her roles in “Phantom Thread,” “Hold Me Tight,” and “Corsage” is that in each of the latter three movies her character goes at least a little mad in her effort to maintain her independence.
One of the keys to Krieps’ performances is that while each of her characters is very strong and finds numerous ways to assert their independence against oppressive systems and relationships, she always seems a little bit uncertain. Faced with a spouse or some other man who makes unreasonable or even threatening demands, she wrinkles her brow and makes a slightly disgusted shape with her mouth. She pauses, as if asking herself Really? It’s come to this? This relationship, or situation, or person, who seemed so promising, has now shown their true colors — and it’s this? This disrespect, this cliché of masculinity, this stupidity? How could this happen, yet again? I don’t deserve this… Goddammit!
And it’s this cognitive dissonance that eventually drives each character mad.
At the beginning of “Phantom Thread,” there is a woman in the Reynolds Woodcock household — Reynolds is his first name — having breakfast with him and his sister. We quickly realize that this woman, a lovely brunette named Joanna (Camilla Rutherford) who has just this one scene, is at the end of some relationship with Reynolds. After being ignored in a few attempts at small talk, she asks, “There’s nothing I can say to get your attention aimed back at me… Is there?” When he feels harassed enough, he begins ranting that “I cannot begin my day with a confrontation” because they are, that morning, delivering a Very Important Gown to Lady Glowem-on-Faut, or something. The movie follows the process by which the gown is presented and fitted on Lady Glowem, while Joanna is never seen again. Her fate is the subject of a short conversation between the siblings that evening. “She’s lovely, but the time has come,” Cyril says, like someone who is used to seeing them come and go. “I’ll give her the October dress.”
Whatever the October dress is, it’s clear what’s going on, once Reynolds meets Alma in a seaside town where she’s a waitress and sweeps her off her feet. When they arrive back at the Woodcock townhouse, he leads her to a bedroom. “This is your room… Mine is right next door.” You can almost smell Joanna’s perfume fading on the room’s threshold.
Alma is quick to understand this dynamic too. So in order to keep from going down the same chute as Joanna (and, presumably, all who preceded her) when Reynolds tires of her, she develops a plot. She poisons Reynolds and makes him dependent on her, first for a spell, and then once he’s recovered and unexpectedly proposed marriage — but without being willing to change his emotionally controlling ways, she poisons him a second time. Only this time he realizes what’s happening — and submits to it. Poison me once, shame on you; poison me twice, it’s on me.
This is the only time in these three films that the Krieps character really wins out, if you want to call being your 30-years-older husband’s caretaker for the rest of his life winning.
This movie oddly leaves out a few things. The most glaring is the nature of the relationship between Reynolds and his women — Alma, Joanna, and however many came before. When he shows Alma to her room in the townhouse for the first time, he tells her to get some rest because they’ll get to work the next morning. And indeed we never see them in bed together. Though they profess love for each other and marry, Reynolds, with his exactness, his obsession with costume and with appearance in general, and most of all his profession, reads much like a deeply closeted gay man in a mid-1950s English culture that never admitted the existence of homosexuals except as mentally ill inmates in asylums. The fate of Alan Turing, who died in 1954,1 is a contemporary reference point, not only because it shows the attitudes of British society at the time but because Reynolds’ own fate is ironically similar.
The other thing it leaves out is any scene that explicitly shows Alma’s method of seizing control of her life and her beloved is a symptom of madness. I said that all of Vicky Krieps’ characters in these three movies go mad in one way or another, and in the other two films much more explicitly. But like the unspoken sexuality that is at the heart of Reynolds’ character, the madness that enables Alma to carry out her plot is hidden.
“Hold Me Tight,” from 2021, seems initially to be about a housewife taking a spur-of-the-moment vacation from her life. After looking in on her sleeping husband and two children in the murky dawn light, Krieps’ character Clarisse writes a note, climbs into her junky AMC Pacer wagon (an odd sight in whatever European country this is, to be sure) and drives away. Her first stop is a hometown gas station owned by a female friend. The whole mise-en-scene is entirely domestic.
But the narrative quickly gets out of hand. When we hear her in voiceover reflecting how her absence will affect her children, as we see images of her husband serving them breakfast and getting them off to school — her son looks to be about 8, her daughter 10; in these first glimpses of them, the girl is beginning the long process of learning to play the piano — the voiceover goes from how the kids might initially miss her to how their memories of her slip away six months, two years, ten years in the future. Well, she’s being maudlin, the viewer thinks; these fears will drive her back home within a few days.
But the fears turn prophetic — she never goes back home. She gets a job in a tourist town at first. Meanwhile we see the members of her family coping, then growing away from the point in time when she left them. Her daughter Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet as a child, Juliette Benveniste as a teenager) becomes a talented pianist, her son remains somewhat dreamy and impassive, until his now-single middle-aged father (Arieh Worthalter) decides to become athletic, then they go rock climbing together. Clarisse witnesses these changes from a perspective that is more and more ghostly: she monitors them through windows, or from her car sitting outside the house; toward the end, she seems to be present in the room but invisible, and heard only by her now former husband.
But that ghostly perspective is only one of what seem to be several possible timelines in Clarisse’s post-family existence. In another, the children and ex-husband are buried in an avalanche at a mountain resort, leaving Clarisse as the living survivor. In another, she is seen walking through the vacant (though still furnished with all the refrigerator drawings and family tchatchkes) family house talking with a man who has bought it. In another, her daughter Lucie’s talent grows until she scores an entrance audition with a Paris conservatory. Clarisse comes in clumsily and sits down to enjoy her daughter’s performance, but the girl is completely spooked by seeing her; Lucie runs out into a courtyard where she screams at Clarisse “Stop following me! Leave me alone! I don’t know who you are!” Then two adults come onto the scene and coldly order Clarisse away — they are listed in the credits as “the true parents of Lucie.”
According to that last timeline, Clarisse was never the mother of the two children we’ve watched for the whole movie, but an insane person who believes that she is. The viewer is forced to reconsider all the scenes in the movie, “Memento”-style.
How many, or which, of these story threads make up the “true” story, and which are the delusions of a Clarisse who is, no matter which story emerges, crazy, is a little beside the point, though it’s human nature to try to make traditional-narrative sense out of any movie. Perhaps the various threads are an intentional effort to present a sort of multiverse view; maybe you can pick your preferred story.
Krieps fully inhabits each of the facets of Clarisse’s character: the tour guide who inappropriately scolds a man who, in her opinion, is bullying a son the same age as her own; the drunken floozy; the unmoored highway driver who chats up strangers at a rest stop; the hovering ghost still invested in her children’s lives; and the woman driven mad when mountain rescue workers find — after months during which all the snow that buried them finally melts — the dead bodies of her family. And for the most part she chooses quiet ways to express her longing, her anxiety or mourning. As I said at the beginning, she manages to convey much with her face. She is always the center of whatever scene she is in.
As we saw in “Phantom Thread,” fabulous gowns suit Krieps to a T, and she gets to wear more than a dozen in “Corsage” (2022), in which she plays Empress Elisabeth of the Austro-Hungarian empire, consort of Emperor Franz Josef I from their marriage in 1854, when she was 17, until her death. You don’t need much more background than that to enjoy this movie, which departs from history whenever it wishes.
The main premise is this: Elisabeth inhabits a meta-reality in which the Empress is supposed to be — is — has to be — a paragon of beauty. She is supposed to be a kind of jewel refracting the glories of the empire onto her royal husband Emperor Franz Josef (Florian Teichtmeister) and the Hapsburg court, and on her subjects. We first see her at a state occasion on which the mayor of Vienna and an assembled multitude greets the royal couple as a boy’s choir sings this verse from the Kaiser’s personal anthem2:
At the side of Emperor prevails,
Related to him by descent and mind,
Rich in charm that never becomes outdated,
Our gracious empress! …
The lyrics are particularly ironic given the fact that Elisabeth is about to turn 40, a threat to the brand: how can she be beloved by all for her beauty if she succumbs to the depredations of middle age?3 She promptly faints, suffocated by her overly tight corset — a garment which, with its attendant accessories, was known as a “corsage,” hence the film’s title. Her imprisonment by the device is a metaphor for the restrictions of royal life, strictures from which, during the course of the film, she attempts to break out. Some of these small rebellions are historical (apparently the real Elisabeth worked out frequently, smoked cigarettes, had a tattoo on her shoulder, and loved riding horses4) and others, no doubt, invented.
Elisabeth is not only battling a mid-life crisis, but Franz Josef’s cold shoulder, the death of her favorite horse, an increase in whispers and calculating glances at court dinners — where, to try and preserve her figure, she eats only a sliced orange while all of the men present cram food down their throats — and even the disapproval of her seven-year-old daughter. After a visit to a hospital for wounded soldiers, during which the Empress breaks protocol and shares a cigarette with an amputee, the tot sternly lectures her: “Mummy, you must consider your position. It’s unbecoming to smoke. You embarrassed me.”
It’s when the indignities really start to mount that Elisabeth starts to go a little crazy. After the Emperor speaks cruelly to her following a fencing session, she jumps out of a second-story palace window. She enlists her closest lady-in-waiting (Katharina Lorenz) to replace her at state occasions. She cuts off her butt-length tresses. (When her royal hairdresser enters the next morning with the Empress’s other chambermaids, the stylist throws herself on the floor, sobbing “That was my life’s work!” Elisabeth, in one of her more considerate moments, gently responds, “Your life’s work is now complete.”)
As if to remind viewers that this is a heavily fictionalized take on a historical personage, the brilliant writer-director Marie Kreutzer scatters anachronisms throughout the film. A telephone5 c. 1910 appears on a wall in one scene, a modern chair in another. In one sequence, a man appears who wants to receive royal support for his new invention, the movie camera (not invented until 20 years later). Most farcically, court musicians perform pop songs of the 1960s and 70s6 for Elisabeth at two different points in the film.
Vicky Krieps’ depiction of Elisabeth carries the now-familiar embodiments of feminine revolt at patriarchal repression and the emotions of joy, rage, and despair, but Elisabeth’s madness is the most convincing of all these movies’ madwomen. And in the end, the viewer questions whether Elisabeth has nosedived into mental illness or flown upward in liberation. Rejection of the patriarchy and its attractive comforts seems crazy, until you’re free from them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_erhalte_Franz_den_Kaiser . The Josef Haydn tune usually known as Deutschland is still used today for Germany’s national anthem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandlied
Or old age, depending on one’s perspective. The royal physician reminds her at one point that her female subjects’ life expectancy is just 40.
This New York Times article has these and many more interesting pecadillos: https://web.archive.org/web/20221008062737/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/movies/the-empress-corsage-sisi.html
The telephone was invented in 1876 and the film is set a few years later, but its presence in the Kaiserhof in 1879 is risible.
“Help Me Make It Through the Night,” by Kris Kristofferson, 1970; “As Tears Go By,” Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Andrew Loog Oldham, 1964