“Sissi” is a darling of the public. The success of the series continues (very freely) inspired by the events of Elisabetta Amalia Eugenia of Wittelsbach, Duchess of Bavaria who was Empress of Austria, very young, beautiful and unfortunate wife of Kaiser Franz Joseph I. Aired on Canale 5, Tuesday evening the first episode of the two that form the third season beat the fiction “Alfredino” broadcast on Rai1. Tonight the second and final part.
Hers was a tragic story – her only son and heir to the throne Rudolf committed suicide, she herself was killed in an anarchist attack – which immediately entered the popular imagination: first it was the romantic fairy tale of the great youthful love for the future sovereign , then the unhappiness and inability to adapt to court life, the intolerance of protocol, the incognito trips away from Vienna, the anxiety for freedom and the obsession with beauty. She lived in a crucial period in the history of Europe, in the midst of the Belle Époque, while epochal political and social upheavals were taking place. For these reasons it has lent itself to being told so much and in many different ways. «Sissi – says the actress Dominique Davenport who plays her in the series – she is an icon, a historical figure well known throughout Central Europe. There are rivers of historical materials, documents, essays, paintings and photos about her; but she has also inspired a true narrative strand in her own right, equally rich, made up of novels, poems, films and TV series. Having to interpret her, she was therefore for me like a kind of ghost whose historical reality and fairy-tale imagery I had to respect.”
There are at least twenty titles – including films and series – that talk about it (many more are those in which it appears “on the sidelines”) from the 1920s to today. The most recent works in particular make Elizabeth a woman with very current characteristics: “The Empress’s Corset” outlines a sort of nineteenth-century Lady D, unhappy and anorexic, while in the still unpublished “Io e Sissi” (in theaters from 4 July) the director Frauke Finsterwalder paints a portrait of an unconventional, free and rebellious woman. And instead she focuses on the fictional series “Sissi” even with a historically accurate background. «The greatest difficulty for me – says the protagonist of the series – was precisely to match the historical character on which I had researched by reading many works with the fictional one, to extract a new Sissi, who was different from all the others in cinema and did not betray the woman she had been.”
In the third season (the fourth is currently being worked on), at the center of the narrative is a thirty-year-old Sissi, a woman who is now mature but still beautiful and restless. The period in which it is set is the early 1970s, a particularly chaotic era also politically, in which the relationship between her and Franz breaks down and little Rodolfo, fought over by the two, finds himself in grave danger. «In her I see – concludes the actress – a normal woman who finds herself catapulted into an antipodal and slightly crazy world, in which she must adapt by moving from a simple life to the complex balances of a sophisticated and intriguing court like the Viennese one . Because of the role she plays she must integrate and become the empress that everyone wants. But it’s too much for her and so she feels even more isolated.”
Swiss-American, former model and dancer, Davenport will soon return to Canale 5 with a new series, still in costume, but set in the years of the Great War, “Davos 1917”: in an officially neutral Switzerland but in the heart of the continent and therefore perfect nest of spies and traffickers, she plays the role of a young Swiss nurse who spies for the love of a son who has been stolen from her
