5/3/2023 0 Comments Gaslight club(To be clear, I really enjoyed Emily, and the other two films as well, and I recommend watching them all.) But what about an unadorned portrait of Sisi, still being bitchy but sans girlbossery, never giving a middle finger to a room full of dignitaries, but just as restless and depressed? Or a movie about Emily Brontë that plays up her weirdness, which we got hints of in Emily, and explores her artistic process, and the fact that she wrote such great poetry and prose without having experienced romantic love, rather than a film that suggests she was just doing an autofiction. Of course it’s possible, but would it work? Would it be successful? Is it what people want?Ĭorsage perhaps has the most overtly feminist themes, and its director and leading actress have also discussed feminism in the context of the film. Their similarity-the fantastical biopic whose fictional elements have a therapeutic effect on the viewer, made stronger by the dramatic irony of our knowledge of how their lives really went-makes me wonder whether it’s possible to make a film that sticks to what we know happened to a famous(ly) unhappy woman without losing all of the cathartic joy we get from the made-up parts. There’s something sad about the idea that we need this fantastical element-akin to the “revenge fantasy” genre, something more like “escape fantasy”-to feel happiness and triumph about these women’s lives. The yearning and passion in Wuthering Heights is real on the page, but irl, Emily lived and died without ever experiencing its fleshy equivalent. Emily’s steamy love affair is a fun, maybe comforting what-if. The third act of Corsage is a liberatory corrective to real-life Sisi, who starved herself to fit into her corsets and was eventually stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist. ![]() Spencer plays with surrealism, dream sequence, and hallucination (Anne Boleyn semaphorically appears) Corsage makes ample use of anachronism, which builds throughout the film Emily employs plain old speculation: what if Emily Brontë did drugs and had sex and got a tattoo? ![]() All three focus on women with independent spirits who struggle against and suffer under strict social regimes, and each film lets these women escape (sometimes just briefly) from the regimes, and soothes the audience with this imagining. In Corsage, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, aka Sisi, makes her lady-in-waiting pretend to be her in public, then, freed from the need to stay skinny, indulges in bonbons and cream cake, and, at the end of the film, jumps into the beautiful blue Adriatic.Ĭorsage and Emily came out last year, Spencer the year before. In Spencer, Princess Diana ditches the royals and drives off in her convertible to eat KFC with her sons. ![]() In Emily, Emily Brontë has a secret love affair that ends tragically and inspires her to write Wuthering Heights. I’m thinking of three I recently watched, those mentioned above. There’s been a recent spate of movies that I suppose could be called fantastical biopics. WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE FILMS “EMILY”, “CORSAGE”, AND “SPENCER”
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