The Favourite

The awards and critical reception for this film made it a rather mainstream success, despite it coming from the maker of such odd films as The Lobster. The period setting, the class of performers, and the awards though make it seem accessible and 'normal' only for it to quickly set out its stall as not being that. Essentially it is the fictional story of Queen Anne and her dear 'friend' Lady Sarah, between whom a new maid comes, setting off a frosty power struggle for the ear of the ailing Queen. On its face it seems like a straightforward period drama, but the delivery makes it more than this.

Much has been written by cleverer people on the selection of lens for shooting, the use of natural light, the fruity nature of the script for the period, all of it true and all of it making the film feel off-kilter from what would be expected. It does this in a way that feels odd but yet is still easy to go with and accessible - as opposed to being deliberately hard to penetrate. Certainly the look of the film keeps throwing me, and I wasn't a fan of the wide lens when it was used, but it did have the effect of making the scenes draw me in by virtue of how odd it was to find that look in a period film. In terms of narrative, it is lively with its fruity language and incident, as well as the twists and turns of the plot itself. This is all well delivered by the lead three actresses, who embrace the teeth of it as much as they do the absurdity of some of it.

All told it is a surprising film in the way that it feels odd and off-kilter in many ways, but yet produces a sharp drama with wit and teeth throughout.

The Favourite was not what I expected. This isn't classic Yorgos Lanthimos, this is a whole new, more whimsical Yorgos Lanthimos, approached parallel to his usual sinister, vexing, and twisted spirit. In full hindsight, this more comedic and less calamitous manner ended with me completely and whole-heartedly digging it. And when I say, The Favourite is more cheer and juvenile than his previous work, I'm not inferring that Lanthimos loses his infamous psychologically poignant gift in this, I'm just inferring that it's done in a much more subtle way, hidden by cynical buffoonery.

At the time being, I would claim that this isn't my favorite-sorry-favourite of Lanthimos's filmography-The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer still hold that spot dearly to my heart-but I would doubtlessly claim that The Favourite is by a long-shot, Lanthimos's most gratifying and crowd-pleasing film. I did not expect to had had such a blast with this movie. Not only is it funny as hell, but the comradery and rivalry between Emma Stone's character and Rachel Weisz's character-both who by the way, give the most dexterous performances of this entire year-was just too much fun to take in. And Olivia Colman's performance as the queen...comical perfection.

The atmospherical tone of this movie also is one of the many aspects that won me over. It reputed like an old-fashioned, 1-on-1, battle of the minds movie, just with touches of Lanthimos's typical synthetic stylizations. It's the cherry on the top of this shrewd satire.

The Favourite might not be as poetically relevant to today's society like The Lobster, or as tramuatizingly stirring like The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but it's a playful piece of mental spectacle that is oddly bone-crushing, yet, pleasing, all at once. Loved nearly every second of it. Bravo, once again Sir Lanthimos. (Verdict: A)

'The Favourite' from the day it came out quickly became one of my most anticipated films. Mainly for the critical acclaim, the vast awards attention and the talented cast (namely Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz). Anybody who has seen and liked Yorgos Lanthimos' previous films, including 'The Lobster', would also find another reason to be psyched about seeing it. Interesting furthermore for seeing a monarch and reign/era not explored an awful lot on film and actually even in general.

Seeing it finally last weekend with my sister, 'The Favourite' didn't disappoint me at all. Completely agree with the acclaim (and just to say there have been times where that has not always been the case) and the award nominations, with it receiving the most nominations of the year along with 'Roma' (another favourite of the year), and hopefully wins for at least a few of the categories are richly deserved. Just to say that my sister also loved it and she knew very little about its critical reception and accolades until when we were talking about the film afterwards, so this is not a case of being "followers" and this is a genuine review from somebody who actually did love it and has been known quite a number of times before for going against the grain when it comes to critical consensus. With that being said, can understand why 'The Favourite' won't click, and hasn't clicked, for some. But what some have deemed bizarre, cruel and pointless for me was one of the most entertaining, most visually striking, best acted and surprising films of the year.

Won't say that 'The Favourite' is exempt from criticism. Do have to agree with everybody who found the ending disappointing. Far too abrupt and it didn't make sense, leaving a very odd feeling and aftertaste.

However, the production values are exemplary. It is a beautifully shot and cleverly edited film, with a few effectively nightmarish moments that didn't distract at all (this is including at the end). All of this complements the evocative attention to period detail and the sumptuous locations interiors and exteriors. Especially good in this regard are the costumes, gorgeously designed and opulent and the muted colour pallette for some of them looks tasteful. Lanthimos keeps things going at a breezy pace while allowing it all to breathe, the surreal and strange elements that has not appealed to all in his previous films certainly present but more toned down here in comparison, which makes 'The Favourite' one of his more accessible films in my view.

Do not agree with those panning the soundtrack. Sure, the Ferrari and Messiaen weren't to my tastes and some of the placement is repetitive in places, but the pieces featured are great pieces on their own. The most authentic uses being Bach, Vivaldi and Purcell (including one of his most beautiful songs "Music for a while"), but most effective was the Schumann Piano Quintet (the opening chords and rhythms are truly haunting) and the poignantly sombre Schubert Piano Sonata, which happened to be one of his last works before his ultimely death. Apart from the repetition, the placement mostly didn't bother me with none of it really juxtaposing with the mood of the scenes (mixing a little camp and just as much seriousness) in question, there is a teasing and disorienting quality that is oddly captivating and clever.

One of 'The Favourite's' biggest triumphs is the script, one of the most entertaining and most beautifully balanced and structured of the year. Many parts are irreverently witty, boasting a number of laugh out loud moments throughout and showing a farce with teeth and bite without being over-the-top or tired. It is also quite darkly disarming and pulls no punches, showing that a period that seems so beautiful and glamorous is not as much as appeared underneath. There is shock value here but it didn't feel that gratuitous and was one of the reasons as to why 'The Favourite' stands out as more than one's "typical" idea of a period film. The political elements are sharp and insightful. And then there is a sensuality that both disturbs and charms, the chemistry between the three leads being witty, chilling and tense. On a story level, only the ending misfired for me, everything else is thoroughly absorbing and the different tones and shifts are balanced expertly with no real jarring, the twists in the story being manic without being too much that one can't take it seriously and the deceptions really digging deep.

A great job is done getting quality performances from the cast, all thoroughly committing to their roles and avoiding falling too much in overplayed caricature. Anne especially in her human fraility is given a good deal of depth that one does root for her, and the film did well providing some poignant emotion when needed without being overt amongst all the strangeness and irreverence. The supporting cast are on point, with Nicholas Hoult being particularly enjoyable in a very gleeful way. It's the three female leads that carry 'The Favourite' and all three give performances that are among the best of the year. Emma Stone is alluring and one roots for her at first, while making Abigail's shrewish character change unsettlingly believable. A perhaps never better Rachel Weisz brings caustic wit and authority to Sarah. Even better is Olivia Colman, a truly magnificent performance that gives the character many shades and vulnerability.

Summing up, a great film and one of my favourite films of the year. 9/10 Bethany Cox

The Favourite, the seventh feature from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, is a film that eschews both convention and expectation. On the other hand, it's also Lanthimos's most accessible by a country mile. 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. A film I liked but didn't love, on the one hand, it's too long, the plot too threadbare, and the metaphors and allegories too ill defined. On the other, the acting is flawless, it looks amazing, the first half is very, very funny, and the end is very, very dark, with the last shot one of the most haunting/disturbing images I've seen in a long time.

Set in England in 1708, the film tells the story of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (an icy Rachel Weisz) and one-time scullery maid Abigail Hill (Emma Stone, charting a course from doe-eyed ingénue to vicious Machiavellian intrigant) and their increasingly bitter rivalry for the affections of Queen Anne (an absolutely mesmerising Olivia Colman), and is the first film Lanthimos has directed which neither he nor Efthimis Filippou wrote (the script was originally written by Deborah Davis in 1998 and later refined by Tony McNamara). Although it deals with real historical personages and events, historians probably won't be too thrilled to learn that Lanthimos is relatively uninterested in either historical actuality or socio-political contextualisation (to say nothing of the slam dancing). This is a story about a love triangle, with everything else just the background noise against which that triangle plays out.

And it is most definitely a Yorgos Lanthimos film, with his peculiar Weltanschauung omnipresent. The emotionless and monotone delivery of dialogue has been scaled back considerably from The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), but everything else you'd expect is here - the pseudo-omniscient judgemental glare; the dark absurdist humour; the formal rigidity; the emotional isolation of the characters; the surrealism; the games of psychological one-upmanship; the alienation of the audience; the thematic centrality of shifting power relations; the lack of distinction between poignancy and joviality; the use of self-contained and closed off pocket universes where characters must play by rules differing from those of the outside world; intimate familial conflict (except in bigger rooms than in his previous films); and a disorienting score. Similarly, whilst The Lobster was a savage dystopian-set allegory for discipline and conformity, The Favourite is a merciless satire of decadence and pettiness, taking in such additional themes as class, gender, love, lust, duty, loyalty, partisan politics, patriarchal hegemony, and women behaving just as appallingly as men.

As one would expect from Lanthimos, the film is aesthetically flawless, with many of the compositions having the appearance of a fête galante painting, so meticulously integrated are Sandy Powell's costume design, Fiona Crombie's production design, and Robbie Ryan's cinematography. Powell's costumes are historically inaccurate, but thematically revealing, with the situation of the characters at any given moment directly influencing the design, especially in relation to Abigail as she climbs the social ladder. In a more general sense, the black-and-white colour scheme of much of the wardrobe contrasts magnificently with Crombie's predominantly brown production design, with the actors effortlessly standing out from the backgrounds.

Of Ryan's photography, perhaps the most impressive feat is that, despite the many scenes tracking characters through rooms, up stairs, and out doorways, there's not a single Steadicam shot anywhere in the film. He also makes copious use of 6mm fish-eye lenses, which distort the spaces the characters occupy whilst also showing much more of the environment than a normal lens, creating the sense 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 distortion and unnatural compositions. As with most of Lanthimos' work, the film also uses natural light, which makes for some stunning candle-lit night-time compositions, partially recalling the paintings of someone like Jean-Antoine Watteau or, even moreso, Georges de La Tour.

In terms of acting, there really are no words to describe just how good Colman is. Utterly inhabiting the character, she is able to elicit empathy mere moments after behaving thoroughly shamefully, communicating 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. Yes, she can be a horrible person with appalling manners and questionable hygiene, but she is also deeply lonely, a survivor who has lost 17 children in childbirth, a woman whose health has made her old before her time, a tragic figure too naïve to see how badly she is being manipulated by Sarah and Abigail. Rather than trying to downplay the contradictory facets of the character, Colman leans into them, illuminating Anne's humanity amongst her least appealing characteristics, and finding both wit and pathos in a character whose mercurial nature and excessive neediness could easily have rendered her the film's antagonist. It truly is one of the finest on-screen performances in a long time.

The film's most salient theme, one could argue its very raison d'être, 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 portrayed as petty, vainglorious idiots. Men, in general, are background players, existing only to be mocked, exploited, and duped - with their ridiculous wigs and heavy makeup, they exist only to support the women. However, what's especially interesting about the film's depiction of gender 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. Sure, the women are much smarter than the men who surround them, but they are no less greedy or cruel. At the film's post-première press conference at the Venice Film Festival, Lanthimos explained, "what we tried to do is portray women as human beings. Because of the prevalent male gaze in cinema, women are portrayed as housewives, girlfriends...Our small contribution is we're just trying to show them as complex and wonderful and horrific as they are, like other human beings." Similarly, 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? All human beings are the same. We're all multifaceted, many-layered, disgusting and gorgeous and powerful and weak and filthy and brilliant. That's what's nice. It doesn't make women an old-fashioned thing of delicacy."

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 - cold formal rigidity, perverse sense of humour, and irredeemable characters being irredeemably horrible to one another. There will be those who find the obviously intentional anachronisms too much, whilst others will take umbrage with the disregard for historical authenticity. For me, whilst I admire Lanthimos for trying to bring something new to his oeuvre, especially when compared to Sacred Deer (which just repeated the beats of The Lobster), I felt the film was oftentimes trying to work its way through an identity crisis, unsure of exactly what kind of tone to settle on. I had similar feelings about the allegories that run throughout, and are never what you would call fully fleshed out. Obviously, it's a treatise on power and the ridiculous opulence of royalty, but that's not exactly an untapped issue in cinema. Additionally, one of my biggest problems with Sacred Deer was how utterly pointless it felt, and although I got a lot more out of The Favourite, I had something of the same reaction to it. It could also be argued that the characters are a little two dimensional, and filmgoers who need a protagonist to latch onto, someone to root for, will be left rudderless.

Superior to Alpeis (2011) and Sacred Deer, but not a patch on Dogtooth (2009) or The Lobster, The Favourite will probably attract a sizable unprepared audience because of awards buzz, positive reviews, and excellent trailer. Undoubtedly, for a lot of people, this will be their first exposure to Lanthimos, and I can only imagine what people expecting a Merchant Ivory costume drama will make of it all. Neither morally enlightening nor historically respectful, The Favourite offers a bleak assessment of humanity's core drives; not Lanthimos's bleakest, but a hell of a lot more nihilistic than an average multiplex goer will be used to. The characters within the film live in a milieu of egotism, narcissism, sexual cruelty, psychological bullying, greed, and hunger for power. 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 that 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 egregious eccentricities and lamentable character defects.

English Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is fighting a war in France. Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) is her favorite courtesan and is the power behind the throne. Her cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) arrives looking for a job after her family had fallen in status. Sarah looks down upon her and sends her to be a maid. She is being whipped when Sarah suddenly needs her to alleviates the Queen's gout pains. Leader of the opposition, Mr. Harley (Nicholas Hoult), is pushing for an immediate peace treaty while Sarah uses her power over the Queen to raise taxes to continue the war led by her husband at the front.

This is a wonderful competition of female relationships. It is deliciously passive-aggressive. All three performances are amazing. The visual style is impeccable. It is a movie of singular vision and great actors.