This plumply preposterous film from director Mika Kaurismäki (brother of Aki) is an unconvincing and solemn account of the controversially mannish Queen Kristina and her secret sapphic yearnings in 17th-century Sweden. There are frilly ruffs, white pointy beards, illicit embraces with ladies of the bedchamber and a Europudding cast reciting dialogue that sounds as if it has been rendered into English from Swedish via Google Translate. We get lines such as: “Like Luther, I want to spend the night with the devil!” and “By Christ’s balls, I don’t like to be kept waiting!” It is like a lost 106-minute Python sketch, as directed by Peter Greenaway, and Kristina comes across as a sullenly emo-ish version of Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I. Her daring intellectual heterodoxy, challenges to Protestantism and final rapprochement with the Vatican are regarded as side effects of a gay sexuality repressed and denied. That might well be a reasonable analysis. Malin Buska delivers the role of Kristina with a certain mutinous conviction and, as the object of her desire, Sarah Gadon is just very demure.
