Sissi face à son destin

Very nice third part of the trilogy left me in tears throughout the viewing. Poor Sissy!!! And all that romance and the beauty made me just feel o so sad that there never was no fourth part to the series. With love,

The third and last episode has the same lyric, poetical tone. But this part is the weakest. Too much of discussions, too little of what I liked in the previous the most -> the idyllic nature celebrating tone

Pigeons spell out the Empress' nickname. 19-year-old Romy Schneider polishes off the last of the Hungarian resistance to her rule, and heads back to Vienna. However Dread Movie Disease strikes and it is only when she overhears her husband the Emperor saying he cares for nothing but her, that her back stiffens. This gives her the will to go to Madeira (actually Campania) for her health, but to no avail; it is only when her mother shows up and makes her climb mountains and go to Corfu that she recovers. Then it's back to Vienna, and the diplomatic grind.

(In reality, the Empress Elisabeth was a health nut who had gyms installed everywhere, and may have been bulimic. However, can't let that interfere with such beautiful nonsense.) Anyway, it's off to northern Italy, where they turn every snub to triumph in glorious Technicolor.

My reviews of this and the two earlier movies in this trilogy have been cynical, but that has been impelled by the utterly simple-minded fairy-tale nature of the movies. To look at a serious drama that considers real problems in some fashion commands my respect; to look at a comedy that mocks its subjects, even as it offers us reasons to love them, gives my ironic eye no crevice to slip a knife in. To look at these movies, which attempt to dazzle us with bright colors and easily proved lies, no matter how much I may wish for simple, nostalgic answers, offends my sensibilities, and always has. A sword's stroke may cut a Gordian knot, but it destroys the useful rope. That is something I understood even as a child. As much as we may wish it, there are no simple answers to complex questions. The illusion that there was a bright, shining Golden Age exists only in the minds of those who did not have to struggle with the problems of those ages.

Certainly Romy Schneider felt this, or something like this. Director Ernst Marischka wanted to make a fourth Sissi movie, but despite being offered a huge salary, Miss Schneider turned him down. She was anxious to get on to other, more interesting work.

This movie, like the previous two, is a lovely bit of fluff, full of bright colors, beautiful people in beautiful clothes in beautiful settings, doing things that must have had the folks in Vienna, out for a bit of strudel with some schlag after the show sighing for the good old days. Nowadays, of course, we sigh for that era.

What a film: full colour (from Agfa), all those typical Austrian names and characters, beautiful and young Romy Schneider, but it is "Kitsch". The movie has nothing in common with real history, but served in the 50s an audience which tried to forget the war and nazism. They took the most wonderful scenes in Venice, when Sissis little daughter welcomes her mother arriving by gondola. Kitsch as kitsch can!

Like the first two Marischka movies ,and although nobody sings in these movies,they are closer to operetta than to cinema.Maudlin and syrupy to a fault,they nonetheless retain a kitsch charm.I must confess I love this exponentional schmaltz.History is given a rough ride,this is an euphemism,although most of the events that are depicted here did happen: Sissi's brother did marry an actress, a misalliance,and the adorable little girl whom Sissi's mother pampers would later be Marie Larish who would play a despicable prominent part in the Mayerling tragedy.The Hungarian part would occur later in Sissi's life,(her son Rudolf was present) and Andrassy's flame was purely fictional.

While watching such candid pictures ,listening to lessons in wisdom and kindness,we almost forget that Sissi's fate was in fact a very dark one,and that her husband was still here when WW1 broke out.Afgacolor pictures are delightful and the ending is guaranteed to make the impressionable use two boxes of Kleenex.

Romy Schneider made a volte face after Sissi the third.She turned down a one million marks offer,and despite her mother Magda -who plays her fictional mother and who was the star of Max Ophuls's "liebelei",left for broader horizons:she was to meet Visconti and Welles at the beginning of the sixties.A far cry from Sissi.She played "Sissi " again in 1972 in Viconti's "Ludwig" and she used to say that the Italian master was the only one who showed Elizabeth as she was.

But Sissi is a dear memory ,particularly if you saw it when you were a child.You remember it like some kind of fairy tale in some faraway magic kingdom where every dream can come true.Or something like that.