The Girl King review – illicit embraces with ladies in the royal bedchamber

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.