From Heimatfilm to Pop Fantasy: Jovana Reisinger on Sisi, Excess & Modern Obsessions

Jovana Reisinger: Sisi suddenly became a fixed part of my life through my Austrian grandmother because the Sisi films were shown on television and my grandmother, in the spirit of Austrian upbringing, relied on local programming and especially on cozy Heimatfilme. So we were constantly sitting on her sofa, staring at the screen, and little by little I became Austrian myself – at least in her eyes.

Somewhere between the fear of being overlooked and the urge to constantly work on and question ourselves, many of us can see our own lives mirrored. At least all of us who, in amazement, compare the current Lindsay Lohan or Christina Aguilera with the versions we grew up with during our adolescence – while being confronted with advertising for longevity methods, the latest rejuvenation treatments, but also with gender expectations and restrictions.

That women and female-read bodies are therefore particularly suitable as characters for body-horror films like The Substance – a film I love very much – is relatively easy to explain. Through these bodies, much that is contemporary and supposedly dystopian can be negotiated.

I can understand not wanting to die. Neither in a purely pragmatic sense nor in a poetic-metaphorical one. I remember being told as a teenager that people of my generation wouldn’t live to be a hundred, but the next one would – and I was immediately seized by envy. I’m someone who lives a full, rich life, and the idea that I will eventually croak really makes me angry. The attempt to at least look young could be something like a trick to keep death at bay a little longer.

That, however, has nothing to do with the discriminatory, sexist, and racist practices of the beauty industry. This current dissolution of values that were briefly agreed upon is frustrating and reactionary; it reinforces ideals that should long since be obsolete.

The Heimatfilm, especially that of the 1950s and 1960s, uses certain motifs that I drew upon: there is singing, eating, the landscape is beautiful, the mood is cozy, danger only comes from outside, and there are also rather rustic characters – in my case a huntress, a witch, and an innkeeper. In my work, however, the guileless Heimatfilm is transferred into a postdramatic narrative that is sometimes cynical, sometimes humorous.

I also tell side stories with great enthusiasm: a dialogue here, a kiss there, a murder somewhere else. That unites all my works, whether novel, film, or radio play. I love telling stories beyond the formally defined frame to show that life is everywhere; the excerpt we are currently looking at is only a marginal one.

The parallels are mostly about exaggeration. Even in classic Heimatfilms, costumes were used to show where someone belonged. The same goes for the settings: the pretty forest, the rustic inn, the postcard-perfect idyll. In a way, we did exactly that too – just with a completely different visual language. Our styling, locations, and props, even the food, act as deliberate disruptions. And those disruptions are what make it interesting in the first place.

We also play with familiar elements, like title cards introducing the main characters – only ours are done in pink, ornamental lettering. There’s food as well, but everything is tinted pink or preserved in jelly. Layering is another key parallel. Take the witch on the alpine pasture: the scenery is flawless, the weather is perfect, the witch appears in a classic outfit – but styled with designer accessories and using gender-inclusive language. All these layers collide at once. The result feels rooted in history and clearly contemporary at the same time, without needing to over-explain itself.

In the context of the time when the Heimatfilm flourished again – directly after the Second World War, while completely different, distinct movements were emerging in France, Italy, and Hollywood – this cheerful singing of the mountains and of carefree life is extremely interesting and quite close to the previously dominant propaganda film. It was clear to me that, since I studied at the University of Television and Film Munich, I had to engage with this kitsch, this genre, and this field – albeit with a corrosive, also accusatory anti-attitude.

That doesn’t mean that I betray my characters or my setting, let alone my story. But I very much wanted to scratch at Bavaria, Austria, and their complacent self-assertion – lovingly, of course. Instead of a Heimatfilm, I made a contemporary-historical grotesque. The grotesque is a genre I devote myself to across media anyway.

There have been two wonderful moments in this regard so far. The first: at one of the early screenings at the Munich Film Festival, someone stormed angrily out of the cinema, even slammed the door, and said on the way out that she had never seen such trash, that it was an outrage to treat everything like this. The second: a reviewer wrote, disappointed, that one didn’t learn anything at all about the former empress and that the film was completely useless if one wanted to engage with Sisi. Oh, and then there was also an editor who announced that she never wanted to see another project of mine on her desk because my characters were so unbearable. I have great fun with things like that.

Due to my many years of work as a writer and columnist, I’m long used to a certain amount of friction and neither need to calculate for it – since it happens anyway – nor pay it special attention. I think the film is a good snapshot of pop culture, myth, and the political, without being pushy. And honestly, I receive a lot of praise from people outside our bubble. They particularly like to mention the aesthetic, the language, and the deep humor, but also the narrative style and attitude. One critic called the film the New New German Cinema. So this film is trash and at the same time supposedly the foundation of a new movement? That simultaneity undoubtedly made me happy.

Queerness in the sense of transgression, of fluidity in gender and especially in costume plays a major role. Probably also in the naturalness with which I portray all of this. But I didn’t set out to make an explicitly queer film, just as little an explicitly feminist one – those are labels I receive anyway. Not only because of the themes I work on in my pieces, but also because of the way I present myself.

My dialogue language in films comes directly from the prose language of my novels – it often feels wooden, dramatized, and exaggerated – and I love that. When I submit scripts, I’m initially explained at great length by various people in various positions why this absolutely won’t work, why it will annoy everyone, why hardly anyone will want to act like this. They were never right – but I was. Of course, not everyone likes this way of speaking; some people tune out, get bored – but this is art, after all. It is allowed to explore, to experiment, and to provoke at certain points. For me, this prose language conveys far more than if I tried to make my characters speak “realistically.”

I like working with a mix of professionally trained actors and non-professionals because they bring different things to the set and thus to the screen. Sometimes, in their interaction, I perceive an authenticity, a particularly raw level – something disarming, something provocative. Sometimes it doesn’t matter to me whether a scene is formally well acted, as long as it conveys the right thing – that can be nonchalance, despair, fear, or anger. As is so often the case when directors talk about their work and their methods, I too fail at fully explaining it.

Incidentally, this working method emerged from practice: I shot my first films with my friends, then more and more trained actors came into my life and my circle of friends, and so the list of people with whom I could realize my films grew. In Unterwegs im Namen der Kaiserin, many of my friends act and almost the entire crew is made up of friends as well – which in turn was due to the fact that we had far too little money and I wasn’t allowed to cast anyone else.

The building in which we located Hotel Elisabeth is the former Wildbad Kreuth sanatorium – the CSU held its annual meetings there for decades. It was incredibly expensive to shoot there, but I absolutely wanted to appropriate this politically charged property. The poem that Romy, Karlheinz, and Magda-Gustav recite at the end on the jetty actually comes from Sisi herself, and beauty treatments were also part of her regular routine. The costumes and the visual language – meaning the dissolution – change depending on mood. Up until the witch’s proclamation, the protagonists wear more green, beige, and brown, and the camera shows rather calm images. From the moment they check into the hotel, the colors become brighter, lots of pink and rhinestones, and the images also become more conceptual; the escalation culminates in the final dinner. There, everyone wears black and the camera shows two different circular tracking shots.

By the way, one rule for costume and production design was to avoid certain colors altogether: black does not appear until this dinner; blue only appears as a Bavarian ornament on napkins and the maypole, and so on.

I fundamentally don’t believe in “the moral of the story” and refuse to give good advice or a call to action. It was important to me to make a film about tourism, capitalism, and the concept of Heimat. That is my version of it. Moving on.

If you believe AI, my signature is described as a “provocative, humorous deconstruction of social role clichés, especially patriarchal and capitalist structures.” I can quite get on board with that. I rely on advertising language, calendar sayings, and a certain aesthetic permeated by my personal devotion to luxury, trash, camp, and a vulgar habitus. At the same time, I would argue that my signature is grounded in my language, because first and foremost I am a writer. Everything begins with a text.

But to immediately undermine the genius myth: without the images of cinematographer Lilli-Rose Pongratz, without the costumes by Laura Fries, Caro Schreck, and Linda Sakallah, without the production design by Lea Steinhilber, Sophia Hubel, Aylin Jander, Katharina Pia Schütz, without the sound by Daniel Hallhuber, without the lighting by Martin Deubel, without the makeup by Steffen Roßmanith, without the editing by Tekin Gültekin, without the music by Balbina and Leo Eisenach, without the color grading by Claudia Fuchs, without the sound design by Pit Kuhlmann, without the production team and without the actors, this would not have become a Reisinger work either. They make it one.

The Empress catapulted me into a phase of exhaustion in the meantime and is now the shimmering, grand conclusion of an intense, beautiful time at film school. This film is my personal greeting from the kitchen, and the consumers are also the film industry itself. This is now my first appearance in the world of cinema. Since I had already been internationally successful with short films and with novels anyway, that took a lot of pressure and fear off me. Because I generally work on several projects at the same time – and have to – themes and motifs sometimes overlap; attentive viewers will notice these intersections. Looking ahead, I can say: I’m looking forward to the next film, in which I will show a completely different directorial language once again.

What is all this for?