Papal Passion

By JAY COCKS

THE ABDICATION

Directed by ANTHONY HARVEY Screenplay by RUTH WOLFF

Here are two of the best film actors in the world, looking miserable and fighting hard as they try to scrounge a scrap of grace and dignity from the shambles of this shopgirl's religious romance. Liv Ullmann and Peter Finch first met on screen in Lost Horizon, an unnatural disaster of a movie which required them to bill and coo at each other while chorus boys in loincloths leapt all about them. In The Abdication, they bill and coo once again-this time with spiritual fervor.

This is the adamantly delirious saga of Queen Christina of Sweden, a role once played by Garbo and now fallen, thanklessly, to Ullmann. She is wise enough not to try to capture Garbo's regal mystery. Ullmann instead goes after Christina's hobbled psyche and knotted libido. The script, however, does not necessarily move in the same direction as the leading actress. Indeed, it gives her very little to go on at all. Scenarist Ruth Wolff furnishes Christina with a mother who twists heads off dolls and recommends the presence of a dwarf during pregnancy. Christina's father, the King, takes her for a ride one day when he reviews the troops, and dies soon afterward. Director Anthony Harvey has chosen to render this event symbolically, by having a riderless white stallion gallop off toward the sunset through a column of tattered battle flags.

Harvey displays throughout a moist passion for metaphor. Because a great deal of Christina's past is shown in flashback, Harvey wets down the royal palace and environs with what we must assume to be the mists of memory. Much of the movie consequently looks fogbound, as if it were photographed during a close night on the Grand Bank. Harvey requires Ullmann to run through fields to demonstrate exuberance, slouch in doorways to show anxiety and uncertainty, and practically pant after a handsome young courtier whose love she fears. "I want to be loved!" Christina complains to a wily minister (Cyril Cusack). "The people love you,"the minister answers. Christina replies: "Send them to my bedroom" -a crack that qualifies her as a sort of 17th century Ann Sheridan.

All the characters in The Abdication talk with a sort of slangy, contemporary coziness ("I've played these power games myself," Christina announces at one point), a style that Harvey first practiced in The Lion in Winter, the original soap opera about crowned heads.

Here, Peter Finch, splendid in a cardinal's red robes, plays a humble servant of the Lord who is torn and tantalized when Christina pops up hi the Vatican. Having renounced the crown of Sweden, she announces: "I'm dedicating my maidenhead to God." After all sorts of religious examination and psychological probing, Finch must confront the bitter truth: he himself has taken a powerful interest in what she has offered to the Lord.

This realization and Christina's perfervid protestations unleash tremors of repressed passion that stay, unsurprisingly, under wraps. The Abdication plumps for denial as the greatest good. Its real validity may be for movies like this. sbJay Cocks

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