The Abdication

When Peter Finch was honored in Summer Under the Stars back in August, one of the movies that I recorded was one totally new to me, The Abdication. It's available on DVD thanks to the Warner Archive.

The abdication in question is that of Christina, Queen of Sweden. Viewers who probably know about her more from watching the Greta Garbo movie Queen Christina will find that this movie picks up more or less where the earlier movie ends; the Garbo movie having dealt mostly with her time as queen. Christina (played here by Liv Ullmann), was very interested in Catholic theology, despite the fact that Sweden was one of the countries that had become Lutheran due to the Reformation. That, and there was also the religion-tinged Thirty Years' War going on for a good portion of Christina's time on the throne. Sweden needed an heir to the throne, and Christina was an only child who refused to marry, so she eventually abdicated in favor of her cousin Charles and left the country, ultimately converting to Catholicism and making her way to Rome to be accepted inot the Church by the Pope.

However, when she arrived in Rome in 1655 she met a Catholic Church in a difficult political situation. The Popes of that era were always Italian, but France and Spain had a lot of influence on the cardinals who would elect each new pope, and France and Spain each had significant influence on a substantial percentage of the College of Cardinals, since Italy was still a series of principalities. Accepting a prominent ex-Lutheran like Christina into the fold was a problem, and the power structure in the Vatican assigned Cardinal Azzolino (Peter Finch) to Christina to see if she was truly sincere in her new Catholic beliefs. (I'd have thought she could have converted along the way to Rome, and while Wikipedia says she technically did, there were political reasons on her part why she couldn't go public with this.) Further complicating matters is that the pope who sponsored Christina into coming to the Vatican is in a parlous state of health. This is another factual issue where I don't know how much the movie got right and wrong: Christina abdicated in 1654, and the then-Pope, Urban VIII, died early in 1655 with a contentious conclave to elect a successor. But Christina didn't arrive in Rome until a couple of months after the new Pope, Alexander VII (no Pope is ever seen in the movie) had been installed.

At any rate, Christina is forced into a waiting game, while all the office politics trying to figure out whether Christina is for real goes on around her. Christina insists on seeing Cardinal Azzolino over and over, and she doesn't care what anybody says about their meetings that have the appearance of impropriety, especially on his part considering that Catholic clergy are supposed to celibate and not even imply they could have a romantic interest in anybody. But those meetings continue and perhaps go too far. In between, Christina has flashbacks about her past and what led her to abdicate.

The Abdication is an interesting idea, although it's one of those movies that's not going to be to everybody's taste. It was based on a stage play, and even though it's been opened up a lot from a stage play by having settings in a bunch of parts of the Vatican as well as those flashbacks, it still looks like it came from a play even if you didn't know it did. There's nothing wrong with that, but it might be worthwhile to know ahead of time that the movie is going to have a lot of scenes of two characters just talking. I think it also assumes that the viewer will have a fairly good grasp of world history, and those who don't might find parts of the movie a bit baffling.

I'm glad I watched The Abdication, but at the same time I can certainly understand why others might not like it.