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Sisi & I Lends a Queer Eye to the Empress’s Last Years

Photo credit (c) DCM_Bernd Spauke, courtesy of Film Movement.

The 19th century Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary—known widely by her affectionate nickname “Sisi”—has been the subject of film biopics for more than a century, beginning in 1921 with a treatment co-written by her niece. Over the next century rarely would a decade go by without another treatment: her story engaged the medium’s great auteurs (including Josef von Sternberg, Jean Cocteau, and Lucia Visconti). A trilogy of films in the 1950s brought a teenage Romy Schneider to worldwide fame. As recently as 2022 both a heralded film (Corsage, directed by Marie Kreutzer and earning Vicky Krieps Best Performance at Cannes) and Netflix series (The Empress, starring Devrim Lingnau) explored her life—and tragic death.

What might be left to tell after literally dozens of treatments? Frauke Finsterwalder’s Sisi & I takes a tack often employed in postmodernist literature and writes Sisi’s story from a “minor” character’s point of view, in this case, that of the Empress’s last lady-in-waiting, Irma Sztáray, with Susanne Wolff playing the role of Empress Sisi and Oscar-nominated Sandra Hüller as Countess Irma. The conceit allows Finsterwalder to convey the queer, bohemian aristocracy of Sisi from the perspective of a naive and inexperienced outsider, bringing the two characters together in a relationship that cannot survive their troubled times.

Irma watches as Sisi kisses one of her court members.
Susanne Wolff (L), Sandra Hüller, and Sophie Hutter (R) in Sisi & I. Photo: credit DCM Bernd Spauke, courtesy Film Movement.

The conceit works, allowing Finsterwalder to explore Sisi’s story from a contemporary LGBTQ+ perspective without any sensationalism—and with no small amount of gentle comedy arising from Irma as the fish-out-of-water in Sisi’s extravagant, eccentric court. The film begins with Countess Irma’s hire by and travel to Corfu, where she will begin her training as lady-in-waiting. Empress Sisi’s demands are harsh and peculiar: she was known for rigorous diet, physical exercise, and maintaining a high standard of physical beauty, and so part of Irma’s tryout consists of hurdling, gymnastics, and measurements, all presented with keen comic timing by the director and the game Hüller as her Irma is starved and exhausted in the Empress’s service.

If there is any parallel for Finsterwalder’s approach her, it might make sense to mention Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a film that like this approached history with a palpable and chaotic energy that seemed intended to forestall its main character’s inevitable tragic fate. Here, like in that film, Finsterwalder creates an elaborate visual design full of royal accoutrements (if no Converse sneakers), eccentric supporting characters, and rich, lush cinematography (here, credit to Thomas W. Kiennast). There is no Bow Wow Wow on the soundtrack, but Finsterwalder’s is like Coppola’s anarchically anachronistic: Portishead’s “Glory Box,” Nico’s “Afraid,” Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her’s “Angel,” Pop Tarts’ “Girly Pop,” and others in a quirky Greek chorus of female-only voices commenting on the film’s action. (Hüller herself delivers a heartfelt and surprising cover of T. Rex’s “Cosmic Dancer” over the end titles.)

Sisi & I is also, in contrast to most earlier film and television depictions of the Empress, unabashedly queer. The Empress’s Corfu estate employs a coterie of Sapphic employees and hangers-on, and Irma is frequently sexually aroused by the touches, tastes, smells, and sights of what goes on there. The Empress has her male lovers as well as female ones. In real life and before the events of this film proper she bore a son, Rudolf, whose death (known as “the Mayerling incident“) by apparent murder-suicide proved shattering. The focus here on the Empress’s life after these events, and on Countess Irma’s developing friendship with her, a case of opposites evolving to attract, presents a part of the famous character’s life unexplored on screen.

That’s not to say that Finsterwalder’s film is rigorously historical. Instead, it might be better described as historically imaginative, taking its inspiration from historical fact but from it devising a contemporary narrative. Hüller is magnificent as the perplexed but devoted Irma, confounded by the Empress’s ways but simultaneously attracted to them, and to her, even as the forces of history close in around her. Wolff makes for a suitably enigmatic Sisi, a woman with a world at her feet but unable to see much beyond her own whimsy.

Irma follows behind SIsi on an outdoor hike.
Susanne Wolff (L) and Sandra Hüller in Sisi & I. Photo: credit DCM Bernd Spauke, courtesy Film Movement.

One might reasonably wonder where all of this is going, and the film at just over two hours long seems to dawdle like a leisurely summer at Corfu before finally reaching its destination. As the two characters’ devotion and friendship grows deeper, the conflicts of nation-states outside their doors press ever harder, bringing Sisi ever closer to her historically predetermined fate. It’s one we know she cannot avoid, but Finsterwalder takes liberties with the process by which it arrives. In a film where two women develop an unanticipated and uncommon friendship, bound in part by a shared history of abuse and yet always unequal in power, Sisi & I‘s imaginative ending may not be technically historically accurate, but it’s nonetheless a fitting conclusion to a proudly unconventional and unabashedly queer film.

Written by J Paul Johnson

J Paul Johnson is Professor Emeritus of English and Film Studies at Winona (MN) State University. Since retiring in 2021 he publishes Film Obsessive, where he reviews new releases, writes retrospectives, interviews up-and-coming filmmakers, and oversees the site's staff of 25 writers and editors. His film scholarship appears in Women in the Western, Return of the Western (both Edinburgh UP), and Literature/Film Quarterly. An avid cinephile, collector, and curator, his interests range from classical Hollywood melodrama and genre films to world and independent cinemas and documentary.

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