The Favourite review: Queen Anne's life reimagined as a prickly lesbian love-triangle
Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos; Starring: Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, Nicholas Hoult, Joe Alwyn, James Smith, Mark Gatiss. 15 cert, 119 mins.
You may recall the bygone days when we smilingly compared the British political scene to Yes, Minister or The Thick of It. Well, gird your loins for the definitive satire of 2019: an absurdist farce in which our nation’s power-brokers yell at ducks, fall face-first into manure, and pelt each other with mouldy fruit.
Such are the manifold amusements of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, which is set during the reign of Queen Anne in the early 18th century, but feels no less bracingly timely for it.
The film shows politics as a psychopathic parlour game, focusing on Anne’s close but fractious relationship with two of her ladies-in-waiting, Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Abigail Hill, who would go on to become Baroness Masham.
The trio are played by Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, all three of whom really are as note-perfect as you may have heard, in the buzz that has been steadily accumulating since the film’s premiere at Venice last year. All three have been nominated for Golden Globes: assume in Colman’s case at least that the Baftas and Oscars are about to follow suit.
She is unmissably good here as a monarch at the end of her rope: endearingly daffy one moment and a spluttering grotesque the next. Now a widow, Anne has been unravelled by the loss of 17 children to miscarriage, stillbirth and early death, each of whom is memorialised in one of the pet rabbits lolloping around her chambers.
Meanwhile, Parliament is consumed by a feud over Europe – specifically the War of the Spanish Succession – and the Whigs and the Tories are at loggerheads. (Nicholas Hoult and The Thick of It’s James Smith are both very good value as the respective party leaders.)
It is into this tumult that Stone’s Abigail arrives, in the hope that her rather more well-to-do cousin Sarah Churchill (Weisz), a hugely influential figure, might be able to find her work. A menial role in the kitchens is scared up – but this clever, ambitious young woman has bigger plans.
Noting the beneficial effects of Sarah’s peculiarly close relationship with Anne herself, Abigail wheedles her way into the household’s inner circle, initially by preparing a poultice of herbs to soothe the Queen’s gout-riddled leg.
Then, hiding in the library one night, she spies Anne and Sarah sharing what they believe to be a private, intimate moment. (This is an invention of screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara – unsurprisingly, there is no historical evidence of consummation, though Anne and Sarah’s letters show the two women had an extremely passionate relationship.) Equipped with this seismic gossip, Abigail spots her chance to scramble up the social heap.
Admirers of Lanthimos’s earlier work may not have anticipated the father of the so-called Greek Weird Wave would turn his hand to costume drama. But as a potted purgatory that ticks along to its own insane rule set, perhaps Anne’s court isn’t so different from the worlds of Dogtooth, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Either way, he seems comfortably at home in this skewer-sharp and scabrously funny film, which is stuffed with quotable deadpan exchanges, and shot on lenses so wide it often feels as if thecamera is squinting at its subjects in disbelief.
Dialogue is often punctuated by that now-trademark Lanthimos camera manoeuvre, the wide-angle whip pan that seems to ask “now what?” – while some of the best lines are reused as chapter headings, such as ‘This Mud Stinks’ and ‘I Dreamt I Stabbed You In The Eye’. Adding to the heightened atmosphere are some extraordinary costumes by Sandy Powell, which blare black-and-white Op art patters across the fading tapestries and guttering candlelight of their surroundings, creating a kind of ambient derangement.
Weisz and Colman have both worked with Lanthimos before in The Lobster, but Stone proves a fast acclimatiser, and the trio immediately gel as a comic unit. One thing they don’t generate, however, is heat: all three become consumed by treachery and bitchiness, but I didn’t buy that actual feelings, in addition to influence and social standing, were at stake.
But the treachery stings, the bitchiness pricks, the commitment to oddness lingers until the fantastically beautiful and ambiguous final shot. The Favourite is wily, warped and ticklish – an uproarious history lesson taught through cracked glass.
The Favourite opened in UK cinemas on January 1
