If you are to believe this variation of the life of Sweden's Queen Christina (Liv Ullman), you have to see her as the most sexually frustrated ruler of all time, a princess raised as a boy then crowned as Queen. She has romantic feelings for a female childhood friend yet lusts after several of the young men in her court as well.
I will never forget my first impressions while watching this movie so many years ago on TV. I absolutely loved it!!
After Greta Garbo abdicated as Queen Christina of Sweden, she caroused through Europe for a year and finally came to Rome, where she expected to be instructed in Catholicism by the Pope. Somewhere along the way, however, she had become Liv Ullman, and now had to pass Peter Finch as Cardinal Azzolino.
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.
Though not as regal and alluring as Greta Garbo in her heavily fictionalized biography Queen Christina, Liv Ullmann gives us a different Christina. In The Abdication Liv Ullmann gives us a woman who is seized by her new religion, but her new religion doesn't know quite what to make of her.
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.
