The Girl King

Mika Kaurismaki’s Queen Christina of Sweden (Malin Buska) is tall, beautiful, and without a hump on one shoulder, but otherwise she’s a fair representation of the historic figure. In her restless spirit, intellectual appetite, impatience with the patriarchy and her lesbianism she’s a much more accurate representation than Rouben Mamoulian’s  (Garbo in Queen Christina, 1933). 

Of course Kaurismaki opts to revive the 17th Century Christina story now because it’s a sharp reflection of our times. I don’t know how Swedes or Finns will see their lives in this film, but much of it rings clear for North America and Europe today. The film bristles with pertinence, like the male advisor’s “Peace doesn’t fill our coffers” and her “Austerity is sadistic.”

Christina’s advocacy of peace, culture, the arts, make her a model for modern leadership. In her refusal to accept male authority, especially not to allow any man to claim her as a field he can plow for his pleasure, she is the prototypal feminist. Sadly, the contemporary also limns through her ultimate defeat by the male authority and their rejection of her same-sex passion as “deviance.” Her male counsellors conspire against her, drive off her beloved, and drive Christina into madness, until she escapes. 

We’re still hung up on the questions she poses to Descartes: what is love, how do we deal with it, how can we free ourselves from it. We still crave the freedom to define our own destiny and escape our inherited structures and strictures. If we’ve moved beyond Descartes’ assumption that our emotions have a physical source, we continue to build upon his confidence in empirical evidence and in the essential use of reason. 

But another Cartesian statement propels the film: To find the truth we must abandon everything we have learned or assumed and establish a new understanding of our world. This is the triumph of discovery over habit, reason over delusion, freedom over “destiny.” This is how this Christina constantly flies in the face of what she has been taught and what is expected of her. 

Her escape is ironic. Her advisors having long insisted she marry to produce a clear heir to the throne, she now proclaims one suitor her son and bestows upon him her royal authority. With a quarter of the treasury she departs to Rome, where she converts to Catholicism and enjoys the life of secular culture and stimulation she has craved. As one counsellor bitterly observes, having rejected all her male suitors she settles into life under the authority of the Pope. The last shots, however, play her as exulting in openness, freedom and the light the Swedish court and “thinkers” denied her. She abandons her throne and power to recreate herself in Rome.
     Now, here’s the crowning irony. Mika and younger brother Aki Kaurismaki are famous for acerbic contemporary stories about inarticulate, hard drinking, ugly and lugubrious losers, steeped in 1950s rock and roll. Nobody in a blind test would guess the sumptuous period drama  The Girl King is a Kaurismaki film. But here the director does what his heroine does and what her healthiest mentor, Descartes, prescribed.  To find the truth, to see how Queen Christina reflects upon our current reality, Kaurismaki discarded his customary period, his familiar genres and his signature style, tone and bathos — to make something completely new. And true to our day as it is to his subject’s.