Sissi’s outfits are like a second skin to her. Putting them on, she becomes Elizabeth of Austria – the Empress requests that her corset be pulled tighter and tighter! To maintain her public image, she celebrates her 40th birthday in a stiff corset and with a graceful silhouette. Sissi feels simultaneously bored and awakened to her desires in her marriage to Franz Joseph. Her children have grown up, but she has no real political power. Starved for knowledge and joie de vivre, Sissi travels through England and Bavaria visiting her former lovers.

Kirsten Dunst’s Marie Antoinette is a sugary pop-rock queen, while Kirsten Stewart’s Princess Diana succumbs to the turmoil of royal routine and ghost stories. Meanwhile, Vicky Krieps (winner of Best Actress in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes) is an annoyingly magnetic Empress Sissi eager to set the rules in the second half of the 19th century. Rebellion and social disapproval grow within her as she dons her pannier every day. Marie Kreutzer’s costume drama looks at the iconic Austro-Hungarian figure through a fragmented logic, offering up a piece of detailed and contemporary revisionist cinema with cheeky middle-finger anachronisms, as if Krieps’ heroine were a captivatingly cynical feminist from today.