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    ‘Corsage’ Review: A Queen in Quiet Rebellion

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    A transfixing Vicky Krieps plays the Empress of Austria who, at 40, begins to chafe against her predictably cosseted life.The princess industrial complex is usually associated with Disney and its procession of royal girls and women from Snow White to Ariel and Tiana. The category also works nicely for all of the many other ostensibly grown-up entertainments about girls and women with heavy crowns. Few ever seem happy with their station in life, and while some find a prince and secure a happily ever after, others break and still others mount improbable great escapes.“Corsage” is the Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s bold, visually striking and ingeniously anachronistic portrait of an empress in complicated rebellion. The rebel — a mesmerizing Vicky Krieps — is the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie (1837-1898). Married at 16 to Franz Joseph, the ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Elisabeth now has two children, a retinue of servants and no obvious cares. A celebrated beauty, she wears tight corsets and glorious frocks, adhering to a regimen of regular exercise and a diet that often consists of little more than beef broth and the slenderest of orange slices.Elisabeth is whisper thin, but something other than vanity and social mores is eating away at her — boredom, despair, a sense of purposelessness — sending uneasy ripples through her life. “She scares me so much,” a maid timidly whispers of Elisabeth, who’s first seen submerged in the royal tub, the camera pointing down at her. Her eyes are open, and she’s holding her nose, timing her breath ostensibly for health reasons. It’s both a useful exercise and a suitable metaphor for “Corsage” (the word also means the bodice of a woman’s dress), especially given Elisabeth’s penchant for tightlacing her corset, which tests her very breath.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.“Corsage” takes place over a number of months starting in late 1877, the year Elisabeth turns 40. Hers is a predictably cosseted, sumptuous life. (The locations include the Hapsburg Palace in Vienna, the former principal residence for the titular dynasty.) Kreutzer — this is her fifth feature film — charts the coordinates of Elisabeth’s quotidian reality from the get-go, briskly presenting its luxuries but also, importantly, letting you see how at ease Elisabeth is in this rarefied world. It’s clear that she lacks for nothing, at least materially. From the way that she holds her head, directs her gaze and impatiently speaks to her maids and ladies in waiting, it’s also evident that she isn’t chafing against her entitlements.With wit, a cool eye and fluid precision, Kreutzer tracks Elisabeth across the next eventful months. Turning 40 proves a difficult milestone for the queen and disrupts her life, though not always for the worse. She’s already a subject of gossip inside and outside the palace, and her weight, habits and appearances can set tongues wagging. The pressure of getting older only makes matters worse. At 40, Elisabeth says in voice-over, soon after blowing out her birthday candles, “a person begins to disperse and fade.” Her distress is palpable, and it’s no wonder, given the creepy, slightly comic, near-threatening song that Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister) and others sing to her on her birthday: “Beautiful may she remain.”There’s a knot of complication in the word “remain,” which suggests that Elisabeth is never permitted to change. That’s underscored by her regimented life — with its rituals of deference, its protocols, its quiet and violent power — which is structured to uphold the institution of the monarchy and the divine right of kings, even as the modern world shudders outside. Part of the story’s tension stems from Elisabeth’s role in the empire’s dual monarchy, which makes her leader of two countries she has no real say over. Her realm is the rooms she occupies; her subjects, her staff. She oversees her children, but Franz Joseph is the king.Elisabeth’s rebellion isn’t overt and obvious; it comes in stages, in small and large gestures, in furtive cigarettes, reckless flirtations and wild gallops across far-off fields. Krieps is wonderful to watch in motion, whether she’s in the saddle, crossing swords or just leaving a dinner. But she’s a virtuoso of stillness, and at times she brings to mind old Hollywood sphinxes like Garbo and Dietrich, whose inscrutable faces worked like wonderful screens on which you could project whatever fantasies you wanted. Yet Krieps is also a performer of the present moment, gesturally and otherwise, which is ideal for a character who’s caught between the old world and the new, and between the privileges that at once exalt and suffocate her.“Corsage” opens and closes with Elisabeth facing watery voids, ambiguous visions that speak to her desire for change, perhaps transcendence. Visions of escape run through stories about unhappily pampered women. Rarely, though, do the gilded agonies, especially of princesses and queens, offer real surprises, partly because anything too alien would break the profitable (binge-worthy) illusion of the relatable royal. Kreutzer retains a critical distance from Elisabeth; she’s sympathetic and skeptical of the character, and shrewdly doesn’t try to fashion her into a martyr or feminist role model. Making Elisabeth interestingly human proves more than enough, a feat that Kreutzer and Krieps accomplish to dazzling effect.CorsageNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Inside the Oscars’ Best-Actress Battle Royale

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      Forget the men: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Clockwise from top left, Margot Robbie in “Babylon”; Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; Danielle Deadwyler in “Till”; Cate Blanchett in “Tár”; Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans”; and Viola Davis in “The Woman King.”Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures; A24; Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures; Focus Features; Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures, via Amblin Entertainment; Sony PicturesBy their very nature, awards shows are designed to exclude, barring all but a few from the glory of earning a nomination.Still, this year’s race for the best-actress Oscar is so stacked with contenders that I’m ready to comb the academy bylaws for a workaround. Are five slots really enough to honor a field this formidable? Couldn’t we swipe a few more from the wan best-actor category, at least?The truth is, even 10 slots would barely scratch the surface of what the best-actress race has to offer. Many of the season’s most acclaimed films, like “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” have given career-best signature roles to their leading ladies, though only one woman can collect the Oscar. Meanwhile, a vast array of up-and-comers, actresses playing against type and underdogs worth a second look will be vying simply to make the final five. Here are the women contending in this season’s most exciting category.The Front-runnersIn the fictional world of “Tár,” the conniving conductor played by Cate Blanchett has been showered with an absurd amount of awards. By the end of this season, Blanchett herself may keep pace with her character.The two-time Oscar winner’s bravura performance — she learned German, orchestra conducting and piano for the role — has netted the most notable prizes so far: In addition to nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Gotham Awards, Blanchett won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival and a pair of leading trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The last time Blanchett triumphed with the critics groups on both coasts, she was well on her way to winning her second Oscar, for “Blue Jasmine.”If she wins her third, the 53-year-old would be the youngest woman ever to reach that milestone. (Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand and Ingrid Bergman are the only other actresses to have won three Oscars each for their performances, while Katharine Hepburn holds the record with four.) But those laurels could also count against Blanchett in a race where her strongest competitor has never even been nominated and is angling for a historic win.Michelle Yeoh came close to snagging a supporting-actress nomination for “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), but this time, she’s undeniable: The 60-year-old’s leading role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” as an ordinary woman who becomes the multiverse’s last hope, should earn Yeoh her first Oscar nod.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.The role shows off everything Yeoh is capable of — including her athleticism, precise character work and sense of humor — and she has teared up in interviews while discussing how rarely a movie like that is offered to an Asian actress. In a recent awards round table, Yeoh told the other actresses, “I honestly look at all of you with such envy because you get an opportunity to try all the different roles, but we only get that opportunity maybe once in a long, long time.” Indeed, no Asian woman has ever won best actress, and after 94 ceremonies, the only winner of color in the category remains Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”Can Yeoh pull off a landmark victory? It may help that she has a more sympathetic character arc: While Blanchett’s Lydia Tár compels and confounds in equal measure, Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang learns to drop her guard and let love in. But the competition in this category is fierce, and Blanchett isn’t the only heavyweight she’ll be contending with.For playing a character based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans,” Michelle Williams is likely to score her fifth Oscar nomination, which puts her behind Glenn Close and Amy Adams as the three living actresses who’ve been nominated the most times without having won. That gives Williams a potent “she’s due” narrative that could siphon votes from both Blanchett and Yeoh; it helps, too, that she gives her all to the part, playing a vivacious woman whose spirit couldn’t be contained by her marriage.The “Till” star Danielle Deadwyler won the first lead-performance trophy of the season at last month’s Gotham Awards, and she’ll need that momentum to overcome striking snubs from the Independent Spirits and Golden Globes. Still, her emotionally precise performance as the mother of Emmett Till has Oscar-friendly heft, since voters often gravitate toward an actor playing a historical figure.It’s rarer that Oscar voters make room for an action heroine in the best-actress category: Though Sigourney Weaver earned a nomination for “Aliens,” Charlize Theron found no traction for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But there’s more to what Viola Davis does in “The Woman King” than just wielding a spear. Her fierce warrior is weary and her battle yells pack a cathartic punch. If the movie can make it into the best-picture lineup, Davis should be swept in.Damien Chazelle’s debauched Hollywood dramedy “Babylon” has earned wildly mixed reviews, but the director helmed two Oscar-winning performances — Emma Stone in “La La Land” and J.K. Simmons in “Whiplash” — and that pedigree has pushed Margot Robbie into contention for her role as a fledgling actress convinced of her own star quality. Nominations for “I, Tonya” and “Bombshell” prove that voters like Robbie in ambitious-striver mode, though the movie is stuffed so full of characters that she can’t quite dominate the proceedings like some of her best-actress competition.Oscar voters might consider an ingénue like Ana de Armas for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” NetflixThe Women Waiting in the WingsCan two Oscar favorites overcome muted streaming launches in a year when theatrical contenders reign supreme? “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” hands Emma Thompson a sexually frank showcase role that had Oscar pundits buzzing at January’s Sundance Film Festival, but the film’s quiet June debut on Hulu drew fewer headlines. And despite a best-picture win this year for “CODA,” Apple TV+ still struggles to get all those “Ted Lasso” and “Severance” viewers to watch exclusive movies like “Causeway,” though the film features a strong, back-to-basics lead performance from Jennifer Lawrence.At least “Blonde” managed a streaming debut that got people talking, though the punishing Netflix drama about Marilyn Monroe had some awfully loud detractors. Can its star, Ana de Armas, rise above those pans? She managed a Golden Globe nomination, at least, and Oscar voters love to single out a rising ingénue, but the film will prove a tough sit in a year with plenty of better-received options.In the first hour of “Empire of Light,” Olivia Colman plays a movie-theater worker who opens herself up to an appealing romance, but in the second, the character goes off her meds and the movie goes off the rails. Even if those two halves don’t quite cohere, Colman definitely gets some big moments to play, and the actress has so quickly become an Oscar mainstay (over the last four years, she has been nominated three times and won once) that she should be considered a perennial option for the final five.Rooney Mara is spirited and sensitive in “Women Talking,” but the studio’s decision to campaign her as a lead actress is tenuous: In this ensemble drama about conflicted Mennonite women, Mara has scarcely more screen time than Claire Foy or Jessie Buckley, who are being positioned as supporting-actress contenders. Then again, Mara is no stranger to category high jinks: Six years ago, she was nominated as a supporting actress for “Carol,” even though she was clearly playing that film’s protagonist.Keke Palmer won a New York Film Critics Circle award for supporting actress for “Nope” even if it really was a lead performance. Universal PicturesThe Dark-Horse ContendersIf social media memes could be counted as accolades, Mia Goth would surely give Blanchett’s haul a run for her money: The young actress’s work in “Pearl,” in which she plays a farm girl who’d kill for stardom, has Twitter awash in Goth GIFs. Ti West’s technicolor horror drama isn’t the sort of thing that Oscar voters usually go for, but Goth is fearsomely committed, knocking out a tour de force, eight-minute monologue that’s topped only by a sustained closing shot of the actress smiling until she cries. At the very least, it’d make for one memorable Oscar clip.I hope that as the membership of the academy grows ever more international, more powerhouse performances will be recognized in languages other than English. In Park Chan-wook’s South Korean noir “Decision to Leave,” Tang Wei is a terrific femme fatale, while Léa Seydoux delivers her finest work as a single mother in the French drama “One Fine Morning.” And Oscar voters who regret snubbing Vicky Krieps for “Phantom Thread” could make it up to her by checking out the royal drama “Corsage,” in which she plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria with beguiling irreverence.Comedic actresses are too often undervalued by Oscar voters, but Aubrey Plaza spent 2022 proving she was capable of much more: Fans of her breakout performance in HBO’s “The White Lotus” should check out her dark, edgy work in the drama “Emily the Criminal,” which earned nominations from the Gothams and Indie Spirits. And “Nope,” which topped our critic A.O. Scott’s list of the best films of the year, boasts a charismatic star turn by Keke Palmer that recently earned a win from the New York Film Critics Circle, even if the group had to pretend she gave a supporting performance to get her out of the way of Blanchett’s leading win. Normally, I’d discourage that kind of category fraud, but in this crowded year, I sympathize with the desire to bend some rules. More

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      An Empress Ahead of Her Time Is Having a Pop Culture Moment

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      A Netflix series and a new movie explore the life of Elisabeth, the 19th-century Empress of Austria who had a tattoo, worked out daily and wanted more from life than just producing heirs.VIENNA — The 19th-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria is everywhere in Vienna: on chocolate boxes, on bottles of rosé, on posters around the city. The Greek antiques she collected are at Hermesvilla, on the city outskirts; her hearse is at Schönbrunn Palace, the former summer residence of the Hapsburg royal family; and her cocaine syringe and gym equipment are on display at the Hofburg, which was the monarchy’s central Vienna home.These traces paint an enticing, but incomplete, picture of an empress who receded from public life not long after entering it, and spent most of her time traveling the world to avoid her own court. She had a tattoo on her shoulder; drank wine with breakfast; and exercised two to three times a day on wall bars and rings in her rooms. These eccentricities, combined with her refusal to have her picture taken after her early 30s, fueled an air of mystery around her.Now, nearly 125 years after Elisabeth’s assassination, at age 60, two new productions — a new Netflix series called “The Empress” and a film called “Corsage” that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May and will hit American theaters on Dec. 23 — offer their own ideas.“Growing up in Austria, she was the main tourist magnet, aside from Mozart,” said Marie Kreutzer, who wrote and directed “Corsage.” Nevertheless, she added, Elisabeth, who was married to Emperor Franz Josef I, is largely a mystery. “Her image is one you can reimagine and reinterpret and fill with your own imagination, because we have a lot of stories about her, but you don’t know if they’re true,” Kreutzer said.The moody, intellectual and beauty-obsessed empress has had many reincarnations.While alive, Elisabeth, who also went by “Sisi,” traveled constantly, often to Hungary, Greece and England, and was rarely seen by the Viennese public. In private, she wrote poetry, rode horses and hunted, hiked high into the Alps, read Shakespeare, studied classical and modern Greek, took warm baths in olive oil and wore leather masks filled with raw veal as part of her skin care routine.A photograph of the empress reproduced at Hermesvilla, a Vienna palace.David Payr for The New York TimesA famous photograph of the empress from 1865. After her early 30s, she refused to have her picture taken.David Payr for The New York TimesMichaela Lindinger, a curator and author who has studied Elisabeth for more than two decades, with a 1882 portrait of the empress, at Hermesvilla.David Payr for The New York Times“She was such a recluse,” said Michaela Lindinger, a curator at the Wien Museum, who has studied Elisabeth for more than two decades and wrote “My Heart Is Made of Stone: The Dark Side of the Empress Elisabeth,” a book about the Empress that inspired “Corsage.” “People didn’t see her, and she didn’t want to be seen,” Lindinger said.Nevertheless, she was the empress of Austria, and later the queen of Hungary, too, so she was widely discussed. “No matter how much she fled the attention and scrutiny and the court, she was always pursued,” said Allison Pataki, who wrote two historical novels about Elisabeth, “The Accidental Empress” and “Sisi: Empress on Her Own.” “She was thrust into the spotlight as this young girl who was chosen by the emperor, in large part because of her physical beauty.”After Elisabeth was killed by an anarchist in Switzerland, in 1898, she became an object of fascination throughout the Hapsburg Empire, and her image appeared on commemorative coins and in memorial pictures. In the 1920s, a series of novels about her were published, focusing on her love life.During the 1950s, the “Sissi” film trilogy, starring Romy Schneider, revived Elisabeth as a happy-go-lucky Disney princess come to life, clad in bouncy pastel dresses and beloved by animals and people alike. The syrupy films, which appear on German and Austrian TV screens every Christmas, are part of the “Heimatfilm” genre, which emerged in the German-speaking world after World War II and feature beautiful scenes of the countryside, clear-cut morals and a world untouched by conflict.“I grew up watching the Romy Schneider movies in a campy way,” said Katharina Eyssen, the show runner and head author for “The Empress,” who is from Bavaria, in southern Germany. As played by Schneider, Elisabeth is “just a good-hearted girl that has no inner conflicts,” she said.Eyssen’s take on Elizabeth, played by Devrim Lingnau in “The Empress,” is feistier, wilder and edgier than Schneider’s. The series opens shortly before Elisabeth meets her future husband (and cousin), during his birthday celebrations in Bad Ischl, Austria. As the story goes, Franz Josef was expected to propose to Elisabeth’s older sister, Duchess Helene in Bavaria, but he changed his mind once he saw Elisabeth.Where Schneider’s eyes sparkle with joy and excitement, Lingnau’s are heavier and signal a darker inner worldPhilip Froissant as Emperor Franz Joseph II and Devrim Lingnau as Elisabeth in “The Empress,” a new Netflix series.NetflixIn the biographies Eyssen read while developing the show, she said, Elisabeth’s character is portrayed as “difficult, fragile, almost bipolar, melancholic.” But Eyssen didn’t fully buy this perspective. “There has to be a creative and passionate force, otherwise she wouldn’t have survived that long,” she said.Much of what is known about the empress’s personal life comes from her poems, as well as letters and written recollections from her children, her ladies-in-waiting and her Greek tutor. “She’s a myth in so many ways,” Kreutzer said. “It was a different time, there was no media as there is today. There are so few photographs of her.”After her early 30s, Elisabeth refused to have her picture taken, and the last time she sat for a painting was at age 42. Photos and paintings of her that are dated later are either retouched, or composites. “She wanted to stay in the memory of the people as the eternally young queen,” Lindinger said.“Corsage” goes further than “The Empress” down the dark pathways of Elisabeth’s character, offering a punk-gothic portrait of the empress at 40, as a deeply troubled soul who grasps for levity and freedom in the stifling atmosphere of the Hapsburg court. She smokes, she’s obsessed with exercise and the sea, and she weighs herself daily (all true, according to historians).The title of the movie, in German, translates as “corset.” Famously, Elisabeth maintained a 50-centimeter waistline throughout her life.Kreutzer and Vicky Krieps, who stars as Elisabeth, decided that, for the sake of authenticity, Krieps would wear a corset like the Empress’s during filming.“It’s a real torture instrument,” Krieps said. “You can’t breathe, you can’t feel. The ties are on your solar plexus, not on your waist.” She said she almost gave up on filming because of how miserable the corset made her.Kreutzer also noticed a change in Krieps, with whom she had worked on another movie several years earlier, that began during one of the first fittings.Krieps, center, with veil, in a scene from “Corsage,” which offers a punk-gothic portrait of the empress at age 40.IFC Films“She became slightly impatient with the women working on it and the women who were surrounding her and touching her,” she said. “I know now it was the physical tension and pain that made her feel unwell and act differently than I know her to be. It was like her getting into the skin of somebody else.”Having grown up on the Romy Schneider films, Krieps said she felt as a teenager that there was something darker in the empress that was being shielded from view, and started to relate to the entrapment she imagined Elisabeth had felt during her life.After Krieps went through puberty, she said, “suddenly I had a sexuality and my body was always related to this sexuality.” Later, as a mother, she said, “my body became something like a prison,” and society expected her to be an entirely different person.She began to see in Elisabeth’s struggles with her body and the roles assigned to her as “a heightened version of something every woman experiences,” she said.The final years of Elisabeth’s life have remained largely unexplored in popular culture. (“Corsage” takes artistic liberties with the portrayal of her death.) After Elisabeth’s only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, killed himself in 1889, her longstanding depression became deeper and more permanent. While sailing on her yacht, Miramar, she would sit on the deck even in bad weather, her ever-present black lace parasol her only defense against the rain and breaking waves, according to “Sisi: Myth and Truth” by Katrin Unterreiner. Once, during a heavy storm, she had herself tied to a chair above deck. According to her Greek tutor, Constantin Christomanos, she said: “I am acting like Odysseus because the waves lure me.”Pataki, the novelist, said that throughout her life, Elisabeth fought against the constricting role of being an empress. From her poems, intellectual pursuits and travels, it appears as though Elisabeth was always looking outward, imagining herself anywhere but where she was. In one poem from 1880, she gave a hint of what she might have been thinking during all the time she spent on the deck of the Miramar: “I am a sea gull from no land/I do not call any one beach my home./I am not tied by any one place,/I fly from wave to wave.”In some ways, Pataki said, she might have felt more comfortable in today’s society than in 19th-century Vienna. “Her primary role and the expectation put on her was, have sons, produce heirs,” Pataki said. “But Sisi was very ahead of her time in wanting more for herself as a woman, an individual, a wife and a leader.” More

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      ‘Hold Me Tight’ Review: An Étude in the Key of Grief

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      In Mathieu Amalric’s new film, Vicky Krieps plays a mother who tries to stay close to her family by running away.Early one morning, Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) slips out of the house, climbs into the 1979 AMC Pacer that has been languishing under a tarp, and drives away, leaving behind her husband, Marc (Arieh Worthalter), and their two young children, Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet) and Paul (Sacha Ardilly).This act of maternal abandonment, at the beginning of Mathieu Amalric’s “Hold Me Tight,” stirs up some familiar emotions and questions. What is Clarisse running away from, or toward? Is this liberation or betrayal? The answers aren’t what you might expect. “Hold Me Tight” doesn’t depend on plot twists or dramatic revelations — the central mystery is resolved early on — but if you don’t want the beginning spoiled you may hesitate to read further.This isn’t a movie about wanderlust or marital discontent; it’s about grief. Clarisse isn’t merely unhappy. Her world has been shattered, and her flight represents a desperate attempt to put it back together. She runs away from her family because she has already lost them, to a deadly avalanche during a ski vacation in Spain. Her departure keeps Paul, Lucie and Marc alive, in her mind and in front of our eyes, in a chronology that runs parallel to her wanderings.They go on without her, the years of their lives filling the months she spends on the road, revisiting the scene of her family’s death and drifting from town to town. The kids grow up, with new actors (Juliette Benveniste and Aurèle Grzesik) playing the older versions. Lucie, a gifted musician, is an especially vivid presence. Her piano playing, which progresses from a halting attempt at Beethoven’s “Für Elise” to a commanding rendition of Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata,” is an important element in the film’s story and a driver of its moods. Bowen-Chatet and Benveniste both actually play the music, which lends gravity and credibility to the character. “My daughter is Martha Argerich,” Clarisse declares after seeing some of a documentary about that Argentine virtuoso. For a moment, it sounds less like a fantasy born of bereavement than like a proud mother’s wishful boast.Do Clarisse’s projections of the family’s life without her represent a coping mechanism or a form of denial? Amalric, adapting a play by Claudine Galea, seems less interested in the psychological implications of Clarisse’s behavior than in the structural and formal challenges her situation presents. He doesn’t mark a boundary between the real and the unreal, but rather treats them as equivalent, cutting from Clarisse to her family as if they were separated only by geography.This generates a particular kind of suspense, as you wonder whether and how the two strands of the story might collide, and to what effect. When the climax arrives, it’s unnerving but also tidy. For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, “Hold Me Tight” proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.Hold Me TightNot rated. In French and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bergman Island’ Review: Love Among the Cinephiles

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      In Mia Hansen-Love’s new film, Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth play filmmakers on the rocks in the Baltic Sea.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of forms, proportions, colors, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.” That is Ingmar Bergman, in his memoir “The Magic Lantern,” rhapsodizing on his “secret love,” the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea. Starting in 1960 with “Through a Glass Darkly,” he shot many of his films on Faro and died there in 2007.In “Bergman Island,” Mia Hansen-Love’s slippery and enchanting new movie, Faro, an austere and forbidding presence in much of Bergman’s work, is revealed as a pilgrimage spot for cinephiles and an appealing seaside destination for less obsessive travelers. Visitors can browse in the gift shop and the library, watch movies in Bergman’s personal screening room, or pile into a bus for the guided “Bergman Safari” (an actual annual event). They can also swim, drink, play Ludo and shop for sheepskins.Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) do some of those things, but they’ve come to Faro mostly to work. Filmmakers with screenplays at various stages of completion, they install themselves in the cottage where some of “Scenes From a Marriage” was filmed. The caretaker who shows them around cheerfully describes it as “the movie that caused millions of people to divorce.” (I wonder if the recent HBO remake will have the same impact.)An unmarried couple with a young daughter (she is staying with a grandmother while her parents are in Sweden), Chris and Tony have perhaps unwittingly arrived at a crisis in their relationship. They are affectionate and easy with each other, but the combination of Chris’s restlessness and Tony’s complacency suggests that things are not quite right between them.In Bergman’s films, love is a volatile element, as often as not a catalyst for emotional anguish and psychological disintegration. A man and a woman in a movie with his name on it are unlikely to find much peace. But Hansen-Love, though she is interested in the gloomy Swede and his legacy, is hardly in his thrall, and Chris and Tony don’t live in anything like the state of metaphysical extremity that so often afflicts Bergman characters.Chris is a passionate movie lover who is nonetheless skeptical of the power of the medium, and “Bergman Island” explores her ambivalence in a playful, critical spirit. She is bothered by the fact that Bergman, the father of nine children with six women, pursued his art at the expense of his family obligations. No woman would have been able to get away with that, she says, a complaint that is met with the usual shrugs, jokes and condescension from Tony and their dinner companions.She acknowledges the difference between art and life, but nonetheless wishes for a measure of “coherence” between them. The possibility of such a thing becomes more than just a theoretical question in the second half of “Bergman Island,” when the as-yet-unmade film that Chris is still struggling to write takes over the screen.That movie-within-the-movie, also set on Faro, involves a young woman — also a filmmaker — named Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who travels to the island for the wedding of a friend and encounters Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), the great love of her life. The two of them met as teenagers and all these years later, even though they are committed to other people, find that they just can’t quit each other.Their passionate, guilty romance — and Amy’s blondness — tilt the story closer to Bergman territory than Chris and Tony’s passive-aggressive courtesies, but the more obvious cinematic reference lies closer to home. Chris’s film is in effect a sequel to Hansen-Love’s “Goodbye First Love,” which followed adolescent lovers into young adulthood.The connection between the movie Chris dreams up and the one she’s in seems both elusive and obvious, as do the possible autobiographical implications of “Bergman Island.” Can it be entirely coincidental that Amy is a near-anagram of Mia, the name shared by Wasikowska and Hansen-Love? Is Tony a stand-in for Olivier Assayas, the French filmmaker with whom Hansen-Love has a child? Are we approaching Bergman’s landscape of doubling and collapsing identities from a different angle?But there are also intriguing hints that Chris and Tony’s story may itself be a kind of film-within-the-film, this one conjured out of Tony’s imagination. When Chris asks about his project, he answers that it’s about the unspoken meanings that circulate through the daily life of a couple, a description that fits the first half of “Bergman Island” almost too neatly. He also explains, during a Q.-and-A. session after a screening of one of his movies, that he tends to identify with his female characters. Does this make Chris his alter ego?To her credit, Hansen-Love doesn’t turn “Bergman Island” into a self-conscious philosophical puzzle. It unspools with an easy, fresh-air naturalism against a picturesque backdrop that doesn’t necessarily conform to anyone’s innermost imaginings. The mood, underscored by Robin Williamson’s sprightly music, is mainly comical, and the artists — Tony and Chris, at least — seem more playful than tormented, even at difficult moments.That may be because they both understand the paradox that “Bergman Island” so brilliantly enacts. It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.Bergman IslandRated R. Cries and whispers. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Vicky Krieps Gave Hollywood One More Try. It Wasn’t So Bad.

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      The “Phantom Thread” actress, burned by the experience of promoting the movie in the United States, retreated to art-house obscurity. Now, she’s back in the M. Night Shyamalan blockbuster “Old.”RAMBROUCH, Luxembourg — Four years ago, Vicky Krieps seemed destined for Hollywood stardom. The Luxembourgian actress had emerged from near obscurity to star in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” in which she portrayed the tormented muse of a domineering fashion designer played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Her performance — vulnerable, prickly, anguished — garnered critical raves and suggested the arrival of a major new talent.Then Krieps seemed to vanish, turning down a host of Hollywood offers, including a big-budget action movie, and instead taking smaller roles, mostly in European art-house films and German television.“I needed two years,” she said recently, sitting in the backyard of her family’s 200-year-old home in rural Luxembourg. The experience of being in the public eye, she said, “was almost traumatizing.”This summer, however, Krieps, 37, is back in the spotlight, with lead roles in two movies at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island” and Mathieu Amalric’s “Hold Me Tight”). And in a move that signals an end to her self-imposed Hollywood exile, she is also starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s glossy new horror fable, “Old,” which arrived in U.S. movie theaters on July 23.Krieps, who is self-deprecating and warm in person but prone to earnest tangents about art and nature, said that the notion of “Old” being shown in so many theaters was stressing her out.“I carry this huge paradox: I’ve become an actor, but I don’t want to be seen — it doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “I’m really scared that people might recognize me.”In “Phantom Thread,” Krieps plays the muse and lover of a dressmaker, played by Daniel Day-Lewis.Laurie Sparham/Focus FeaturesIn “Old,” Gael García Bernal and Krieps play a couple who witness their children turn into adults in a span of hours.Universal PicturesIn the film, which also stars Gael García Bernal, she plays a mother of two who, while on a family vacation, becomes trapped on a beach where people grow old at a vastly accelerated rate. Her character, who witnesses her children turn into adults in a span of hours, is the film’s emotional anchor, and Krieps has received widespread praise for her performance.In a Zoom interview, Shyamalan said that he had been a fan of the actress since “Phantom Thread,” and that he had been drawn to her “classical dignity.” He added: “It’s so beautiful having someone of her caliber being so vulnerable at the center of a genre film.”Her decision to do the movie, she said, stemmed from a confluence of factors. Amid the pandemic, she had been thinking a lot about the nature of time: “I felt that the film could tell us something about how we as people live in a construction of time and space, running from A to B, but really running from ourselves.”But she also said she had increasingly come to terms with anxieties that emerged with the release of “Phantom Thread.” At that time, she said, she had approached her career — and life — without much of a plan, and had been unprepared for the promotional demands and industry attention.Krieps, who now mostly lives in Berlin with her two children, said that her desire for self-effacement was largely rooted in her upbringing in Luxembourg, a tiny duchy squeezed between Belgium, France and Germany. The country’s size is conducive to modesty, she said.Krieps said that “Old” had something to say about how people are “running from A to B, but really running from ourselves.”Julien Mignot for The New York TimesA self-described “dreamy” teenager, after high school she left Luxembourg for South Africa, where she spent a year volunteering as a teacher for children with AIDS. While there, she had an epiphany about pursuing an acting career in a damascene moment involving a low-lying mountain that she glimpsed from a road. “I had a deep connection to this mountain and its energy,” she said, “and I decided I wanted to be someone who can capture this feeling, and release it, maybe on a stage.”After enrolling in (and leaving) acting school in Zurich, she cobbled together a living with mostly small roles in German television and film. Then one day she received an email with a video audition request that she distractedly misread on her phone as an invitation to try out for a student film project. “I was sitting on the bus and had just started an interesting conversation with a stranger — you know how it is,” she said.She sent in a submission, recorded on her phone, and it wasn’t until she received a call from her agent alerting her that Anderson had liked the video that she realized it was for “Phantom Thread.”The movie’s press tour, she said, had been a culture shock. She had never had a credit card, and when she arrived in Los Angeles, she was surprised to discover that she would need one to check into her hotel. “I said, ‘I’ll go to a campground — I don’t care.’” (The hotel eventually relented.)Then came her media training: “It was a woman telling me what was wrong about me and to not say my opinions,” she said. “I walked through L.A. in shock, thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this what they want from me?’”That experience cemented her decision to evade international scrutiny by returning to Europe. Her work there included a supporting role in “Das Boot,” a German TV series and, more recently, “Hold Me Tight” in French and “Bergman Island,” Hansen-Love’s long-gestating English-language project. That film, set to be released in the United States on Oct. 15, centers on a filmmaker couple (played by Krieps and Tim Roth) who visit the Swedish island of Faro, where the director Ingmar Bergman once lived.Hansen-Love, a French movie director, said in a telephone interview that Krieps had a “melancholy that is very European” and compared her acting style to that of Isabelle Huppert.“I had thought: ‘Phantom Thread’ will go away again, people will forget me,” Krieps said.Julien Mignot for The New York TimesIn “Bergman Island,” Krieps’s character has a series of encounters that make her question her role as a mother, partner and artist. Krieps said that her character’s search for an identity had also helped her overcome some of her own reluctance about Hollywood.“This woman is trying to find a solution to the question of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is real?’ The answer is: There is no real,” she said, adding that the realization had pushed her to become more open-minded about what projects she wanted to pursue.Krieps said she would be willing to make more big-budget American movies in the future, though her post-pandemic schedule is already packed. She recently completed filming “Corsage,” a German-language biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and her upcoming projects include a “Three Musketeers” adaptation and a film by the Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw, in which she is set to play a United States border agent, her first onscreen attempt at an American accent.Her return to U.S. filmmaking, she added, felt a little bit like closing a book that she had left unopened. “I had thought: ‘Phantom Thread’ will go away again, people will forget me — but I can’t undo this movie,” she said. “It’s like undoing who I am.” More

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      ‘Old’ Review: They Say Sun Can Age You, but This Is Ridiculous

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      A half-hour at the beach costs vacationers a year in this disquieting new horror puzzler, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.In the opening pages of “Dino,” a 1992 biography of Dean Martin by Nick Tosches, the author cites a haunting Italian phrase: “La vecchiaia è carogna.” “Old age is carrion.”When some vacationing families are deposited on a secluded beach recommended to them by a smarmy resort manager in “Old,” the new movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, we see a trio of vultures atop a tree take to the sky.Not long after that, unusual things begin happening. The young children of Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, both superb, as is the entire cast) feel their bathing suits tightening. An epileptic psychologist (Nikki Amuka-Bird) unexpectedly finds herself without symptoms. The elderly mother of the trophy wife of a tetchy physician just up and dies. A moderately famous rap star (Aaron Pierre), who had come to the beach some hours before, wanders around befuddled, with an incurable nosebleed. The corpse of his female companion is discovered in the water, prompting the physician (Rufus Sewell) to accuse the rapper of murder.In time — not too much time, because, as it happens, it is of the essence in this situation — the beachgoers figure out that they are aging at an accelerated rate. One half-hour equals about a year.And the beach that is aging them won’t let them leave.Some vacation. Shyamalan adapted his disquieting tale from the graphic novel “Sandcastle,” by the French writer Pierre Oscar Lévy and the Swiss illustrator Frederik Peeters. As is frequently the case with French-produced bandes dessinées, “Sandcastle” is a stark existentialist parable. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the book Krieps’s character attempts to read on the beach is a dual biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.) Shyamalan expands on the book in the way one would expect an American filmmaker to — among other things, eventually offering a sort-of explanation that the source material doesn’t.Being PG-13, “Old” does not dwell, as the graphic novel does, on how rapid aging affects the children of this ensemble in the hormonal department once they hit their teens, although one pregnancy does occur during the victims’ shared life-in-a-day. Instead, the movie buckles down on the considerable anxiety and dread felt, and amplified, by the frequently bickering adults. Because time is accelerated here, wounds heal incredibly quickly. The director exploits this for a couple of weirdly harrowing knife fights and an impromptu surgery scene. The horrific potential of bones breaking, then instantly resetting themselves incorrectly, does not go unnoticed.Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here. Sometimes the camera will pan back and forth in a ticktock pendulum fashion (get it?) and return to its starting point to reveal a terrifying change. The way he switches out his actors as their characters age is seamless. (The filmmaker’s work in the verbal department is not so felicitous. He names Pierre’s rap star “Mid-Sized Sedan”; early on one character complains to another, “You’re always thinking about the future, and it makes me feel not seen.”)If old age is carrion, it’s also, as a “Citizen Kane” character put it, the one disease you don’t look forward to curing, which provides the impetus for the movie’s finale. While Shyamalan is often cited for his tricky endings, it’s arguable that he doesn’t quite stick the landing with this one. He adds to the story a dollop of that much-venerated Hollywood commodity, hope, and also doles out some anti-science propaganda that couldn’t be more unwelcome at this particular time in the real world.OldRated PG-13 for horrific imagery, language and aging. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More