The new “Sisi” movie: Do it like Harry and Meghan in exile, only with style (and drugs)

There is one last photograph of Sisi alive, which hangs in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest and was taken the day before Sisi was assassinated in Geneva, September 9, 1898. A snapshot that Sisi would have hated if she had seen it . The Empress of Austria and the Queen of Hungary resided in Geneva under a pseudonym and for many years had only shown her face in public with a veil.

The picture shows her and her last lady-in-waiting, the Hungarian Countess Irma Sztáray, unveiled, hurried past the window facade of a brasserie that also offers billiards, both with hair pinned up under dark feathered hats, a light-colored umbrella hanging from Sztáray’s left arm she gives the Empress a walking stick. An everyday photo. Sisi is 60. Sztáray 35. The next day, Sisi will die in Sztáray’s arms after Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni is fatally stabbed with a dossier in Geneva. Sisi had hired the young countess four years earlier because she needed a fitter companion, one who didn’t always pant in the royal sports craze.

The statue of the two guards in Budapest is historic. But Sztáray looks exactly like the “me” from Frauke Finsterwalder’s new movie “Sisi & Me”. Like the actress Sandra Hüller. What incredibly accurate casting. Almost creepy.

And history was not Frauke Finsterwalder’s starting point, as she explained after a performance in Zurich. She had bought meters of specialist literature, but when it became known that she was going to make a Sisi film, so many helpful Austrian historians, who really thought they knew everything about Sisi best, contacted her that they preferred specialist literature and historians left again.

She needed a vision for her work. And she had. Namely, the vision of one of those women who lived by Sisi’s side, who devoted her every moment, both awake and dreaming. Women who for years had no other purpose in life than Sisi, who were at the mercy of all their obsessions, good and bad. Groupies by the side of their superstar. And many of them, including Sztáray, later published their memoirs. When she gets a holiday, she is downright madly in love: “Wherever I stay,” she writes, “whatever I do, my Empress is always with me. Her slender figure stands before me, her gaze rests on me, and I mean her dear voice to be heard.”

Sztáray’s predecessor, Marie Festetics, who was deposed due to physical overload, had only just appeared in Marie Kreutzer’s other Sisi film “Corsage”, it was then about the Empress’ middle years. Now it’s about the last years, the years she spent almost exclusively in Corfu or in Algiers, always traveling, often at sea, always on the run – from court, from her own image as the most beautiful woman in Europe, which has cemented them with all his might, from aging, from food, from boredom, especially that which does not contain an essential element of beauty.

Of course, this is the decadent escape of a privileged woman, she is well known, and actually, says Frauke Finsterwalder, this Sisi was a pretty boring person. The others, the dependents, were interesting. Irma Sztáray, but also Count Berzeviczy (Stefan Kurt), a devoted courtier who stole a gauntlet from the Imperial corpse in real life. And what’s interesting is what Finsterwalder, Wolff and Hüller made of it.

Finsterwalder co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, the writer and winner of the Swiss Book Prize Christian Kracht, and that a good dose of pop culture and irony is thrown at us in the cinema is of course evident from the soundtrack, which starts with Portishead, until the great modern and extremely stylish costumes, to a cocaine cure in Corfu, a hash trip in Algiers and beautiful sentences such as “I always think of tablecloths when I see men”.

And here this butterfly house of aesthetically pleasing neuroses begins in a very tangible way, namely with the aptitude of the immensely unmerciful Irma (who is 12 years older in the film than in the historical reality), races, hurdles, ring gymnastics must be completed , Irma has power, but is otherwise the opposite of the Empress in everything. Gradually the two women get closer, Irma gains strength, finds her way in courtly things, becomes a confident flirt, Sisi finds an almost girlish ease with her, the two celebrate an intimate, silly, romantic friendship full of unreasonable adventures.

But Sisi needs even more new and younger molders belonging only to her, she often behaves insultingly and yet always denounces the abuse of her own person. It’s a bit like Harry and Meghan, she’s in self-imposed luxury exile complaining about court in Vienna, only she does it with a lot more style and sharp punchline. For Irma, the situation is clear: “I love you, Elisabeth,” she says.

In general, everyone here always loves each other, libido and jealousy are as fluid as the robes, and according to Sisi’s gay brother-in-law, there are “several hectoliters of officer semen” in his bowels. Only Sisi hates her Franzl here. And all mothers hate their daughters. In the beginning, Irma’s blood flows because she is beaten by her mother. Eventually Sisi’s blood will flow. In genef.

“Sisi & Me” is wonderful, for two and a half hours you surrender to Sandra Hüller’s always very direct, surprising, exquisite, highly comical acting, as she last saw so wonderful in “Toni Erdmann”. The only fatal thing is that, a few months after “Corsage”, the film evokes one déjà vu after another: the grown Empress, her sport, her diet addiction, the hiring of doppelgängers for public appearances, the love of water, the journey to England all together the affection for a young rider, the contemporary soundscape and last but not least the irony and foil polished language – all that was just in the cinema.

An accident? A contemporaryity of the new images of an empress? “Did I just watch the same movie for the second time?” one viewer asks. You want to contradict him, but somehow the contradiction gets stuck in your throat.

“Sisi & I” will be in cinemas from March 30.