A Couple of Queens
House of the Dragon’s lesbian drama, and yet another Sisi adaptation
For a hot second in July, Frauke Finsterwalder’s Sisi & Ich (2023) was playing at Quad Cinema. Sisi is indelible in my internal mythology, so of course I had to see it. And despite my expectations[1] and a small handful of objections[2], I found it delightful. In fact, I think we might as well consider it part of the lesbian cinematic canon. It’s also an unfortunate example of a deceptively sophisticated film overshadowed by another more hyped, more simplistic arthouse twin (this being Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, 2022, starring Vicky Krieps, which celebrated its US premiere at the New York Film Festival. History will likely remember the gloomy Corsage. The paradoxical Sisi & Ich? I’m not so sure). Told from the vantage of Hungarian countess Irma Sztáray (Sandra Hüller) a very real Lady-in-Waiting to the Empress Elisabeth “Sisi” of Austria, Sisi & Ich is basically a romance: the profound-if-toxic, ultra-power-imbalanced love story between a courtier and the fragile straight woman she adores. It’s also a wholly new spin on the Sisi-trope, now showing a world steeped in female homo-sociality telling of the fascination Sisi held for other women, and further, a fascination that women likely held for Sisi in return. She certainly indulged some kind of thirst for (platonic) female companionship: it’s no secret that Sisi obsessively relied on a whole menagerie of unwed women at court, most notably a hairdresser who moonlit as Sisi’s body double at ceremonies[3].
Sztáray, who has no interest in marrying due to her aversion to men, is handed over to the Austrian Imperial court as a last resort. She’s supposed to travel to Corfu to find the Empress (Susanne Wolff), become her companion, stay in her favor, and, somehow, also keep the Empress under control. Sztáray unwittingly succeeds in these first few steps before succumbing to Sisi’s world of late European romanticism. Soon she is utterly absorbed into Sisi’s universe, amidst the dramatic landscapes of Greece, Algeria, and Bavaria, stunning interiors and fancy gowns, flush with eating disorders, drug experimentation, spiritualist séances, and bipolar tendencies. Sisi & Ich is as close as you can get to Bergman’s Persona (1966) if it were the prequel to Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1944). It gets that there’s no greater aphrodisiac than a power imbalance between two people as close as a lady and her maid, applying homoerotic lessons from Sarah Water’s Fingersmith’s adaptations and Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy (2014), the tying of laces, the polishing of buttons, the wistful, urgently highlighted intimacies between a royal figure and those closest to her. At times I fondly remembered the meek thriller Les adieux à la reine (2012) starring Diane Krüger as a Marie Antoinette all-too preoccupied with her female courtier.
What makes Sisi & Ich unique is how it plays out like a screwball comedy. Like the best of this genre, there’s a secret tragedy at its center. Whoever Sisi might be will always elude us, and however we may wish to satisfy her, we will always fail. What Finsterwalder achieves is a solid portrayal of Sisi as both villain and heroine, one who is as confounded by her precarious mental health and continuous ennui as we are. Indeed, I was surprised by how much I felt for Wolff’s rendition of Sisi, who plays the empress not just as an aloof mean girl with bulimia but as someone compelled to behave outrageously against her own will, as if some deeper, unsavory force were propelling her forward. Wolff plays Sisi like the unapologetic basket case she likely was, but with a soulfulness that will really get to you, and nowhere do we doubt Sztáray’s adoration. Despite all the contradictory information the movie makes us wrestle with, the cyclical oscillation between icy rejection and co-dependent intimacy, we wind up just as beguiled.
Hüller, one of the most hyped actresses of recent times, imbues Sztáray with a childlike, oblivious earnestness. Like her historical namesake, who wound up publishing a pious memoir of Sisi’s final years, Sztáray seems incapable of connecting the dots on her feelings towards Sisi, no matter how often she declares her love and suffers in her frustrated affection. Other female courtiers make passes at Sztáray, but she remains fully repressed and under Sisi’s spell. Sisi meanwhile, while surrounding herself with women and gay men, displays that difference that so inherently yet mysteriously exists between gay and straight women: the former would rather avoid men out of indifference, the other out of hurt and disappointment. I was moved that Finsterwalder acknowledged this difference, and that she refrains from conflating the yearning Sisi has for erotic fulfilment with men with her neediness for female friendship; rather, she lets this weird opposition become its own character in the film [4]. When Sisi dallies with a hunky English army officer, Sztáray jealously rats Sisi out. Petty grievances abound. The weird seesaw of power between Sztáray and Sisi is not without violence, and by the time Sisi is assassinated, one wonders if Sztáray would have liked to have murdered the Empress herself.
Two queens remain gridlocked between hatred and friendship in the second season of House of the Dragon, which concluded last weekend with a tepid hiss rather than the chomping sound of a dragon’s jaws. Yes, it’s true, the show runners bet too heavily on their CGI dragons, which were meant to assuage the thirst for head bashing and sexuality this more acceptable, more sanitized, more “feminist” (I guess?) version of Game of Thrones denies. But even highly expensive CGI dragons must be activated tastefully and with dramaturgical care, and now it feels like we have neither sex nor violence, and still for some not enough dragons (my biggest complaint remains a plot hole: what’s preventing Rhaenyra from gathering her clan of dragons, nipping off the mammoth menace Vaghar, and basta? Can someone explain why all the characters keep muttering about this civil war as an inevitability cataclysm?) But you know what, I like it anyway.
It's understandable that the second season’s tonal shift felt crass. Season 1 leapt across decades and swapped out younger for older leads mid-way. Season 2 preoccupied itself with events happening over what may have been several weeks, with characters removed to their individual interiors, scheming and begrudging and starting little lesbian affairs. I want to be clear that I understand House of the Dragon is not a lesbian show. And yet there is a lot of writerly intent behind scaling the drama to a chamber play between two queens.
In a brilliant move, the writers eliminated the age gap between the two protagonists, Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower. This allows for House of the Dragon’s plot to veer less Snow White and more Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, with the ensuing civil war forged from the furnace of emotions between two teenage girls. There are several layers to this burning heart of the show, likely fueled by the actors. In the first half of Season 1, non-binary actor Emily Carey, playing the young Alicent[5], acknowledged the specific tension she built into her scenes with Milly Alcock (who played young Rhaenyra). Platonic or romantic, the tension is impossible to unsee from the characterization of Alicent, who functions as a kind of lady-in-waiting to Rhaenyra, not much different than Sisi’s Irma Sztáray. Preoccupied with her best friend but facing pressure from her political-insider father, Alicent goes on to marry Rhaenyra’s widowed father, King Vyseris, setting in motion the plot to dispute Rhaenyra’s succession. The betrayal seems defensible from Alicent’s perspective, who (like that character from Sisi & Ich!) is hurt by Rhaenyra’s id-drive and has grown into an anal rule-follower. But even Alicent’s sense of duty offers little leverage in explaining the extent of her vitriol, and it’s plausible to consider that Alicent’s fixation on Rhaenyra as based on thwarted emotional investment.
By the second half of Season 1, Alicent and Rhaenyra’s power struggle mirrors one of the more gothic tropes in the midcentury Hollywood Western, in which two women face off in a rivalry or duel. A whole type emerged around actress Mercedes McCambridge, who (though herself likely straight) built a whole repertoire of angry butch lesbians, including her uncredited role as the unnerving masculine rapist in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). The trope usually plays out around one woman trying to control another whom she perceives as too powerful, liberated, or sexual. In Johnny Guitar, it’s Joan Crawford’s monopoly on the land and her self-assured, entrepreneurial butch figure who, Rhaenyra-like, sets off Mercedes McCambridge. In Lightning Strikes Twice (1951), the threat literally originates from the sexual prowess of a rival female character. Much like in HotD, it is impossible to explain the vitriol between the characters without taking misplaced sexual energy into account. Shoot-outs and angry glances, same as the strangling and slicing in HotD, signify repressed desire[6]. I particularly like what these movies represent, and how that ties to the show: female chauvinism at an ultimate frontier. The American west and a medieval fantasy world become interchangeable: in both, allegiances are fragile, the landscapes are filled with mystery and danger, and all men must die, valar morghulis.
And in typical Game of Thrones dramaturgy, the writing revolves around the joy of inverting and twisting. What was once up must go down, the Apollonian eventually becomes Dionysian, and so on. By the end of Season 2, it’s Alicent who is ready to throw away all she’s stood for and begs to run away with Rhaenyra. Now it’s Rhaenyra who stagnates in her sense of duty, when it was she who once in loudly day dreamed of whisking Alicent away on dragon back. It’s My Brilliant Friend, except that the writer’s decided to make the subtext come alive and turn Rhaenyra explicitly bisexual.
This is not the first time there’s a kind of lesbian frisson in Game of Thrones. Almost all major female characters (Cersei, Daenerys, Arya, even, to an extent, Sansa) have partaken in some kind of queer behavior, either in book or show. There’s even been fully lesbian female side characters (Yara Greyjoy recently found her predecessor in HotD’s hot new pirate queen Sharako Lohar, who has many wives and is played by out trans lesbian actress Abigail Thorn). But there’s a centrality to the Rhaenyra and Alicent storyline that is obviously different. For one, there’s the flirtation and teasing by the lead actors. Emma d’Arcy prominently identifies as non-binary and plays Rhaenyra with that je ne sais quoi energy that seems queer, if not beastly, with a slithering sexuality that makes desire Rhaenyra’s driving force throughout—from hooking up with her uncle Daemon as a minor to taking on a plethora of lovers. These side pieces are all a specific type. As if to counterpoint her tempestuous marriage to platinum-haired Daemon, Rhaenyra’s lovers tend to be dark-haired, brooding protectors. This extends to Rhaenyra’s newest romance with her advisor, Mysaria.
Mysaria is complicated: she’s Daemon’s former mistress and has grown into Rhaenyra’s most trusted ally, but was not always so, and amid all the trauma bonding and heartfelt vulnerability, their trajectory contains pricks of riskiness. When Rhaenyra and Mysaria finally kiss, in Episode 6, it seems wonderfully gratuitous, in the most soap opera dramatic way. Both characters are tied to each other for survival, and there’s a sense of Portrait of a Lady on Fire-style equal playing field. But because this is a soap opera, one must ask: is it really so? After all Rhaenyra is the rightful, if de-throned, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms etc, and being the closest to the queen brings great advantages to wild card Mysaria. It’s the kind of situation that complicates the narrative in an almost too exciting way. HotD already has enough to go around. Will the writers even have time to establish this major plot point they set in motion? … Who knows!! It’s really annoying!! There certainly was little interest in romance during the remaining two episodes of the season, in which Mysaria and Rhaenyra scheme and plot and gaze wistfully into the sunset but not at each other.
What’s fun is that, far away from Westeros and in the very real realm of the internet, the gulf between show and fan fantasies has been eclipsed. One might not expect it, but for followers of “Rhaenicent,” the fandom hysterically celebrating Rhaenyra and Alicent as a romantic couple, Rhaenyra’s romance with Mysaria is ironically validating. Wildest dreams are unleashed, fantasy rules, and all is well.
A few more notes:
Jean-Pierre Melville’s movies are on at Film Forum, and the amazing and intense L'Armée des ombres (1969) features a butch Simone Signoret, as a housewife turned member of the resistance. It is one of her best and most heart-breaking roles. They also screened a top secretly lesbian movie: Léon Morin, Prêtre (1961) starring the wild and mysterious Emmanuelle Riva. Not that anyone asked, but if I could have contributed to the programming of Film Forum’s Sapp-O-Rama in February, I would have picked that one.
Joan Chen, who played Anne Heche’s paramour in Wild Side (1995) and the hot mom in lesbian classic Saving Face (2004) once again plays a hot mom (sorry!! It’s true!!) in Sean Wang’s sweet new breakout feature Dìdi.
I really liked this excerpt from a book that will be released next month called MY LESBIAN NOVEL (omg!!) by Renee Gladman
Eva Baltasar’s novella Mammoth is finally out and it is absolutely feral. More on this soon.
Austria’s entry into the Oscar competition this year, Des Teufels Bad (The Devil’s Bath) by my friends Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, is now available on Shudder. It’s not exactly a lesbian movie, but it focuses heavily on female experience, and it is a truly shocking historical drama.
The wonderful people of Cruising the Movies showed two formative lesbian pornos at IFC the Monday after the Rhaenyra/Mysaria hook-up aired. Clearly there was something lesbian in the stars that night. It was revelatory to see the great Nina Hartley in one of her early roles. I haven’t seen a porno at the cinema in a very long time, and never (that I can recall) in the USA, surrounded by other lesbians. It was a far cry from the time I walked out Jess Franco’s Doriana Grey/Die Marquise von Sade (1976) at FilmCasino in Vienna and found Béatrice Dalle quietly smoking a cigarette in the lobby. IFC by comparison was quaint and gentle. The lights accidentally stayed off after the movie had ended. Amid the awkward shifting of bodies in the dark, one lesbian shouted “orgy!” All the other lesbians chuckled hopefully, you know, “as if,” and then everyone found their way to the exit.
That’s it! I know this was a long one! Thanks for reading!
[1] It’s hard to overstate the saturation of Sisi-themed media in recent years, including a squeaky Netflix TV-show and at least three feature films.
[2] The score includes prescriptive pop music; it’s whatever. I also could have done without the scenes featuring a way-too brutish Emperor Franz Joseph. But the absolute worst part of the film, the vengeance of the Prussians upon the Bavarians, the Germans upon the Austrians, was that Susann Wolff’s Sisi speaks standard German or Hochdeutsch. The contrast is particularly acute given the appearance of Sisi’s gay cousin Luziwuzi (Georg Friedrich), who speaks with a seedy Viennese inflection.
[3] Apparently when said hairdresser married, co-dependent Sisi made a major plea with the Imperial court for her stylist’s return (it was not custom for married women to be part of an empress’ entourage). Cue a joke about the intersection of lesbians and hairstylists (Shane from the L Word).
[4] Finsterwalder’s nuance here really highlights the shallowness of Marie Kreutzer’s approach in Corsage, in which, grotesquely, Vicky Krieps’ Sisi makes a pass at her gay cousin King Ludwig II and then acts like she’s dismayed by his rejection, which is the cringiest thing I’ve ever seen in any media featuring Sisi.
[5] Carey had previously also played the younger versions of Wonder Woman and Lara Croft. Gen Z these days!
[6] For more on this, see Patricia White’s UnInvited Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999)