Cmema
Queen and cardinal
Duncan Fallowell
The Abdication Director: Anthony Harvey. Stars: Liv Ullman, Peter Finch, Cyril Cusack. "AA' Warner West End Two (102 minutes) Frightrnare Director: Pete Walker. Star: Rupert Davies. 'X' London Pavilion (88 minutes) In The Abdication Peter Finch does not play a young, hopelessly golden-haired European king confounded by the onus of the future and the pleasures of the present. Liv Ullman, last seen going through elaborate marriage rites in the Bergman heavy, does not play an enigmatic American woman of the world with strong eyes and an unexpected capacity for toppling thrones. Alas. This abdication belongs to Queen Christina of Sweden in the seventeenth century and, like a good many historical romance pictures, suffers from an over-developed sense of history. Lines are delivered with that tumescent ponderosity which beseeches us to believe great events are indeed in the making. that the fate of civilisations afflicts the shoulders of Miss Ullman and Mr Finch.
In the imagination of the cinema Queen Christina is still Greta Garbo in her big skirts, but Liv Ullman
seeks to augment the standard mythology with a sex angle which may be similarly inscrutable but hardly ever wants to be alone. Arriving in Rome an ex-monarch and a convert, the querulous interrogative seems to be, "Is she a lesbian or does she just like panting around in tights like Prince Charming?" Rumour has it that her journey to the Vatican occasioned terrific excesses in unforgivable watering holes, behaviour most blasphemous. This dubious reputation is not helped by the question of her accommodation. Christina rightly wants a palace but the Pope drawn.
Cardinalspare a wing. Daggers
wiCtharadingarlanAd is more zzwolainrdoro(bPee)ter Finch interested in her body and soul than in her living quarters, and there is a long central debate between them, Swedishi nt erc tit wc court ut hrt f ns chiboadci nk gs tao s pt hoet part for Cyril Cusack teaching her the ways of a queen), in which he sanctimoniously explains why he is almost as mixed up as she is. It is the perfect opportunity for some really serious cinema of the inv°' cative tradition, a discussion of the differences between lust and love. Unfortunately Ruth Wolff's screenplay, adapted from her stage play, does not quite bring the
to sufficient a pitch of met ea
wysairds metaphysical
to sufficient a pitch of met ea
wysairds metaphysical i reality to give much credence to the confrontation. Instead it is trivialised down to the familiar, hectoring, "Which is it to be, me or the Church?" as if these were adequate analogues for the body and the soul. Unwittingly they have sliPPed the lid of a central question then backed off into burlesque platitude. Liv Ullman gets that sturdy breast a-heaving, Peter Finch .flickers hungrily in a theological tizzy, a, joyless impasse. A waste 0' dialectical time is had by all. More successfully simulated is the ambience of the Vatican itself where malicious mongerings and creepy-crawly espionage take place, in the shadow of priceless works 01 art and where you can hear a footstep in a corridor a mile off vtphaoanpnletki wears getaorps Perhaps a pi ns v et nn at it o ni s owf yd dome
the
e Were Frightmare good it would wbeacvnerwy sick ic ck entices niceome dy about a it young people into her front parlour on the pretext of telling fortunes and then kills them off instead, whereby the It is hapenlioetr oanppesetpisrionvgide the meat to go with two veg. But it is not good. that from Rupert at aavliieesgcsehPet receives her just desserts. There .la certainly room for cannibalism in the modern cinema. After all it is something which film people knovi a lot about at an ethical level, along with the stab in the back and the unkind cut. The subject has of course been tackled from the Orin; oco point of view but Lana Turn always turns up her nose as if she had just been told she is eating stewed lizard. And there was that brilliant moment in Satyrical Whet' a dead man's will stipulated that in order for his friends to inherit they first had to eat his body, and theY did. oB.ut the only sub-cutane°.:
en R rn feature of the Frightare is
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