The Abdication

A film of suppressed emotions about suppressed sexuality, but more than that, about the nature of love and the power of giving oneself to another, and the tragedy of being unable to. This is a beautiful film, both in how it looks, and how it thinks, it is unrelentingly heartbreaking. Ullman is somehow mesmeric, you can't take your eyes off her, you feel her pain in all its rawness and wonder how one human being can endure so much. Finch's character is a support to hers, it is almost like you care for him only inasmuch as his actions affect her.

This is a movie that will take your breath away, it is profoundly moving (I know what that sounds like but it is).

I saw this film in the Ford rubber tree plantation in Belterra close to Santarém in the Amazon in the second part of the 1970:s.

Of what I can remember, there was a lot of forced horse-riding in the film, mostly by the beautiful, womanly Liv Ullman, who didn't had the slightest resemblance with the portrayed queen Kristina. Queen Kristina was known as almost ugly with a mans body, language and habits.

Sitting there in the middle of the rain forest in a warm and humid provisional cinema, with the projector rattling amongst the onlookers, I wondered if the spectators understood anything of what they saw on the screen. A story that took place 350 years before and in a country of ice and snow.

And me - who had read about the abdication in school, how the daughter to the king who had fought the catholic church, and died in the 30 year war, became a catholic - realized that there are ten thousand different ways to tell a story and this was not the one my historian teacher had told me .... or the one I had imagined!

Queen Christina of Sweden (Liv Ullmann) abdicated her throne in 1654. After converting to Catholicism, she travels to Rome to prove herself to the Pope. The Pope is dying. Cardinal Azzolino (Peter Finch) is assigned to evaluate her.

Liv Ullmann is a charismatic beauty. It is a small movie despite its grand locations. I struggle to figure out Christina and her interior personal story for the first hour. This version takes her disputed sexuality to be celibacy. In this way, this is more about the power dynamics within marriages at this time and her religious conversion. It speaks to the changing power dynamics between the sexes in the 70's.

I will never forget my first impressions while watching this movie so many years ago on TV. I absolutely loved it!! I was riveted to the screen by this complicated and multi-faceted person in history who I had here-to-fore never heard about.

This movie belongs right there with other historical classics produced from the 50's to the 70's. I still remember being absolutely fascinated by Liv Ullmann's performance. What a colorful character Queen Christina of Sweden was - but Liv Ullmann made her come alive with her portrayal of an OCD personality that gave me my first introduction into a disorder that I had previously never known about. I don't know if the real Christina had OCD or not, but that was what I remembered most about the movie. I would love to see it again.

This film was shown once on local TV in the early 1980s (but I was too young to watch it) and then fell completely off the radar in the interim; however, thanks to the God-sent overhaul that TCM UK has finally decided to give its long-decaying schedule of endlessly-repeated titles, I was able to finally catch up with it after some 25 odd years! Not because the film has any kind of reputation per se but its credentials are certainly impeccable and European History has always been one of my favorite subjects in school (and one in which I excelled in). The story of Sweden's Queen Christina had already been dealt with magnificently by Rouben Mamoulian in his eponymous 1933 film which had provided Greta Garbo with arguably her greatest role; this being made a good 40 permissive years later, the independent-minded Protestant monarch (Liv Ullmann) renounces her faith and throne to sneak into the Vatican and pour out her lesbian longings for a childhood friend onto a Roman Catholic Cardinal (Peter Finch) engaged to investigate her well-documented wanton ways and her newly-professed piety! The two stars, reunited a year after Ross Hunter's maligned 1973 musical version of LOST HORIZION, are practically the whole show here despite being surrounded by opulent sets and a cast of thespian notables: Cyril Cusack (as Christina's guardian), Graham Crowden (as a fellow Cardinal), Edward Underdown and Kathleen Byron (as, respectively, Christina's chivalrous father and embittered mother) and diminutive Michael Dunn (in his last film as Christina's enigmatic servant). Celebrated cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth shoots the opening abdication scenes in moody candlelight, bathes the film in mist during Christina's childhood reminiscences and lends it a sunny look during her liberated passages; Nino Rota's music score is also appropriately sensitive or soaring according to the film's moods. Incidentally, another failed historical/religious charade featuring Liv Ullmann I would like to see is Michael Anderson's POPE JOAN (1972)…who knows if TCM UK will likewise surprise me and provide the opportunity to catch up with it in the not-too-distant future?