The Favourite (15.)
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Starring Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, Nicholas Hoult, Joe Alwyn and Mark Gatiss. 119 mins.
Having arisen from the restrictive practices of the subtitled arthouse movie, the third English language feature by Greek director Lanthimos is his take on the British costume drama. This tale of backstabbing and beastly behaviour in the court of Queen Anne is a vision of the depths of human depravity which may leave you wondering how something so foul can be so frightfully entertaining.
It's the early 18th century and Queen Anne (Colman) is a gout-ridden, food shovelling gargoyle with a pet rabbit for each of her 17 children that died in childbirth. Only dimly aware of the affairs of state, she allows the warmongering Lady Marlborough (Weisz), who has her ear and other orifices, to steer her towards ruinous tax rises in pursuit of hostilities with the French. Then young Emma Stone arrives at court and starts to worm her way into the queen's affections.
The original script by Deborah Davis has been knocking around for a couple of decades and you can imagine it being a quite straightforward tale of palace intrigue until Lanthimos (The Lobster, Dogtooth) got his hands on it and turned it into an amalgam of the two most distinctive costume dramas this country has produced, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman Contract. From the Kubrick film it gets the sumptuous candlelit cinematography; from the Greenaway film its arch sensibility and detached pleasure at the watching the cruel games playing.
It says something about Lanthimos that he can take on two cinemas biggest misanthropes and still comes out smelling of compost. Every element of it is designed to be abrasive. Cameraman Robbie Ryan (Wuthering Heights, American Honey) used very wide lenses that often create a fisheye effect that distort the characters relationship with the space they're in. It doesn't want to draw us in, which is a mercy given that every single person in it is hateful.
The film take the costume drama to his ugliest extreme, to expose our facile obsession with the great and the good. It is though very funny (actual laughing funny, not nodded appreciation funny) and if nobody on view is likeable, they are enjoyably unpleasant. The cast is uniformly excellent from the royalty to the humbled servants. It's tough to keep an audience onside with such a harsh vision but the film effectively conveys a sense that this was just how things were back then and the characters are just doing what was expected at the time. Unlike most historical drama it has a genuine interest in the past as being different from now, and it is filled with historical nicknacks and rituals that are inexplicable. It focuses on the day to day realities of costumed existence: the mud, the inconveniences, the toilet facilities and casual acceptance of sexual abuse. Perhaps ultimately it isn't so much different from all the other costume pieces though: it's a visual treat, has shaped a number of outstanding roles for its actors to excel in and is going to be a big contender in the awards season.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Starring Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, Nicholas Hoult, Joe Alwyn and Mark Gatiss. 119 mins.
Having arisen from the restrictive practices of the subtitled arthouse movie, the third English language feature by Greek director Lanthimos is his take on the British costume drama. This tale of backstabbing and beastly behaviour in the court of Queen Anne is a vision of the depths of human depravity which may leave you wondering how something so foul can be so frightfully entertaining.
It's the early 18th century and Queen Anne (Colman) is a gout-ridden, food shovelling gargoyle with a pet rabbit for each of her 17 children that died in childbirth. Only dimly aware of the affairs of state, she allows the warmongering Lady Marlborough (Weisz), who has her ear and other orifices, to steer her towards ruinous tax rises in pursuit of hostilities with the French. Then young Emma Stone arrives at court and starts to worm her way into the queen's affections.
The original script by Deborah Davis has been knocking around for a couple of decades and you can imagine it being a quite straightforward tale of palace intrigue until Lanthimos (The Lobster, Dogtooth) got his hands on it and turned it into an amalgam of the two most distinctive costume dramas this country has produced, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman Contract. From the Kubrick film it gets the sumptuous candlelit cinematography; from the Greenaway film its arch sensibility and detached pleasure at the watching the cruel games playing.
It says something about Lanthimos that he can take on two cinemas biggest misanthropes and still comes out smelling of compost. Every element of it is designed to be abrasive. Cameraman Robbie Ryan (Wuthering Heights, American Honey) used very wide lenses that often create a fisheye effect that distort the characters relationship with the space they're in. It doesn't want to draw us in, which is a mercy given that every single person in it is hateful.
The film take the costume drama to his ugliest extreme, to expose our facile obsession with the great and the good. It is though very funny (actual laughing funny, not nodded appreciation funny) and if nobody on view is likeable, they are enjoyably unpleasant. The cast is uniformly excellent from the royalty to the humbled servants. It's tough to keep an audience onside with such a harsh vision but the film effectively conveys a sense that this was just how things were back then and the characters are just doing what was expected at the time. Unlike most historical drama it has a genuine interest in the past as being different from now, and it is filled with historical nicknacks and rituals that are inexplicable. It focuses on the day to day realities of costumed existence: the mud, the inconveniences, the toilet facilities and casual acceptance of sexual abuse. Perhaps ultimately it isn't so much different from all the other costume pieces though: it's a visual treat, has shaped a number of outstanding roles for its actors to excel in and is going to be a big contender in the awards season.
