Yorgos Lanthimos (2018)

Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film is stylistically confident and consistent or, to put it another way, monotonous.   It’s immediately clear that this British royalty period drama, set in the early years of the eighteenth century, is going to subvert genre conventions.  The typography of the opening titles, like the subsequent chapter headings that appear on the screen, is eccentric to the point of disorienting.  The dialogue is often breezily anachronistic (‘No pressure’, ‘That’s not going to happen’) and sprinkled with f***s and c***s.   Queen Anne and her courtiers keep falling over or suffering other undignified humiliations.  Lanthimos throws these things into relief by placing them in a traditional royal history film context:  the art direction and costumes are sumptuous; the soundtrack includes music by Bach, Handel, Purcell and Vivaldi.  It’s not only because the modus operandi is so insistent that things soon feel familiar:  the approach isn’t as novel as Lanthimos seems to think.  Asked if she slept well, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough replies, ‘Like a shot badger’ – a phrase straight out of a Blackadder script and far from the only one in the screenplay (by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara).  The nearly non-stop cutting-down-to-size of highborn historical personnel is Blackadder-ish too.  It’s a treatment better suited to a weekly TV sitcom than a two-hour film with dramatic as well as comic pretensions.

Lanthimos has forged an international reputation in cinema with explorations of sealed-off and startlingly unorthodox groups – Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster.   He co-wrote all three of those (and the subsequent The Killing of a Sacred Deer) with Efthymis Filippou.  This new film is his first since his debut feature, the co-directed My Best Friend (2001), for which Lanthimos doesn’t have a screenplay credit.  It’s not hard to see why an English monarch’s court and the power struggles within it appealed to him (perhaps especially as a non-Brit) as another pathologically cloistered set-up.  The Favourite tells the based-on-a-true story of a vicious contest between Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and her impoverished cousin Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), whom Sarah introduces to the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman).   Abigail schemes successfully to replace Sarah as the royal favourite and, by doing so and like Sarah before her, bend the ailing, unhappy Queen to her will.  Sarah’s husband, the Duke of Marlborough (Mark Gatiss), is away fighting the War of the Spanish Succession for most of the film, which repeatedly suggests that national military strategy is dictated by the Queen’s whims and alarmingly changeable moods.  There’s a strong lesbian element in the feelings Anne has for the other two women.  Abigail, as well as sharing the royal bed, tantalises and in due course marries the young courtier Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn).   The slender storyline is stretched out to two hours thanks to a plentiful supply of incident, as well as bizarre court divertissements that include duck races and a naked man being pelted with fruit.  The closing stages are anti-climactic:  Lanthimos has made his points long before then.

The quality of the design, cinematography and much of the acting elevates The Favourite.  The film was shot at Hatfield Hall in Hertfordshire.  Production designer Fiona Crombie ‘drew inspiration from the chequered black-and-white marble floor in the Great Hall for the film’s colour palette’ (Wikipedia) – a palette reinforced by Sandy Powell’s costumes.  The wigs, according to Sally, are exceptional.  Robbie Ryan’s wide-angle shots convey not only the large scope of the royal rooms but also the mixture of isolation and claustrophobia generated by the settings and set-up of the characters’ lives.  Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are both first-rate:  mastering an English accent without evident effort, Stone gives her most technically accomplished performance to date.  It’s the fault not of her or Weisz but of the screenplay that these portraits are limited by repetition.  Joe Alwyn is crisply witty as Masham.  Many will enjoy (more than I did) Nicholas Hoult’s turn as the flamboyant, ridiculous Whig-turned-Tory politico Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford.

As Queen Anne, Olivia Colman is something else and Lanthimos is too smart not to exploit her unusual combination of talents.  The numerous rabbits running round her chambers represent the monarch’s many deceased children[1].  The rabbits, although another of the film’s bizarreries, also reflect a more unusual sliver of compassion on the part of its director.  An actress who instinctively engages with each character that she plays, Olivia Colman makes the gout-ridden Anne both self-pitying and genuinely pitiable – exhausted by ill health and by the weight of her gowns and other regalia.  Colman’s natural humour and comic timing in The Favourite are what we’ve come to expect from other roles.  In this one, she also goes to places more disagreeable than I’ve seen her go before – in Anne’s screeching outbursts of petulant anger, in the sense we get that the monarch is sometimes cheered up by realising she can do as she pleases.  At two points in the film, Lanthimos has Colman give the camera a protracted stare.   Both stares are mesmerising.

As we made our way out of this London Film Festival screening of The Favourite at the Embankment Gardens Cinema, I heard a couple enthusing about how ‘original’ and ‘wonderfully filthy’ it was.  There’s no arguing with the latter term of praise if you’re partial to wonderful filth but I’m less sure about the ‘originality’.   As Abigail gets ready for sex with Masham for the first time, she asks him, ‘Are you going to rape me or seduce me?’  ‘I’m a gentleman,’ Masham replies.  I found myself muttering ‘So, rape, then’ before the words were out of Emma Stone’s mouth.  That’s how predictable the dialogue had become before the film was an hour old yet Abigail’s putdown got a huge laugh.  It’ll be no surprise either to find The Favourite figuring prominently in the forthcoming awards season and viewers, critics included, congratulating themselves on enjoying something daring and different.  But Yorgos Lanthimos has moved a distance from the challenging Dogtooth.  He’s now giving his audience just what they want to see and hear.

19 October 2018

[1] Before she ascended to the throne in 1702 at the age of thirty-seven, Anne was pregnant at least seventeen times over as many years.  She miscarried or gave birth to stillborn children at least twelve times. Of her five live-born children, four died before reaching the age of two.  Her sole surviving child died at the age of eleven in 1700, the year also of her last abortive pregnancy.