Review of The Favourite (2018) by Bertaut1 — 19 Jan 2019

Fans of Yorgos Lanthimos will love it. I'm not sure about everyone else.

Although The Favourite, the seventh feature from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, eschews both convention and expectation, it's also his most accessible film by a mile. A merciless satire of decadence, a savage morality play, a camp comedy of manners, a Baroque tragedy, an allegorical study of the corruptive nature of power - it's all of these and yet none of them. On the one hand, it's too long, the plot too threadbare, and the metaphors too ill defined. On the other, the acting is flawless, it looks amazing, and it's as funny as it is dark.

Originally written by Deborah Davis in 1998 and later refined by Tony McNamara, the film is set in England in 1708, and tells the story of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) and one-time scullery maid Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) and their increasingly bitter rivalry for the affections of Queen Anne (a mesmerising Olivia Colman). Historians, however, probably won't be too thrilled to learn that Lanthimos is relatively uninterested in either historical actuality or socio-political contextualisation. This is a story about a love triangle, with everything else just the background against which that triangle plays out.

The film's most salient theme is the dynamic of gender politics. For starters, it's headlined by three actresses (something which is still rare enough as to be notable), whilst the men are background players, existing only to be mocked, exploited, and duped. However, what's interesting is that the world of women is anything but a utopia. Yes, it's relatively free of toxic masculinity and the male gaze, but in most other aspects, there's no real difference between the matriarchy and the patriarchy. The women may be smarter, but they are no less greedy or cruel. When asked by the Hollywood Reporter if a film about females treating each other badly might be considered a setback in a post #MeToo era, Colman explained, "How can it set women back to prove that women fart and vomit and hate and love and do all the things men do? [...] That's what's nice. It doesn't make women an old-fashioned thing of delicacy.".

As one would expect from Lanthimos, the film is aesthetically flawless. Director of photography Robbie Ryan makes copious use of 6mm fish-eye lenses, which give the impression of characters lost within an overload of background visual detail. Combined with the whip pans seen throughout the film, the cumulative effect is a world rendered strange, a place of distortions.

Elsewhere, the emotionless and monotone delivery of dialogue has been scaled back from The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), but everything else you'd expect from Lanthimos is here - the pseudo-omniscient judgemental glare; the absurdist humour; the formal rigidity; the surrealism; the games of psychological one-upmanship; intimate familial conflict; a disorienting score.

In terms of acting, there really are no words to describe how good Colman is. Utterly inhabiting the character, she communicates a sense of both tragic inevitability and a childlike refusal to accept reality. The character could easily have been a grotesque villain or a pitiful broken shell, but Colman finds a nobler middle ground, straddling both interpretations without fully committing to either, moving from one to the other seamlessly throughout the film. Rather than trying to downplay the contradictory facets of the character, Colman leans into them, finding Anne's humanity amidst her least appealing characteristics.

As regards criticisms, although I personally wouldn't class them as flaws, some people will probably dislike the same things that many have disliked in Lanthimos's previous work - formal rigidity, perverse sense of humour, and irredeemable characters being irredeemably horrible to one another. There will also be those who find the obviously intentional anachronisms and historical inaccuracies too much. My biggest issue was that oftentimes the film seemed to be trying trying to work through an identity crisis, unsure of exactly what kind of tone to settle on. Additionally, some of the allegories are never fully fleshed out.

Neither morally enlightening nor historically respectful, The Favourite offers a bleak assessment of humanity's core drives. The characters live in a milieu of egotism, narcissism, sexual cruelty, psychological bullying, and greed. There's barely a hint of sentimentality, and very little that could be called morally righteous. I would have liked it to have more meat on its bones, but at the same time, one cannot deny it presents something of a faithful looking-glass, as Lanthimos continues to corner the market in pointing out not just humanity's worst foibles, but its most bizarre eccentricities.