The Favourite

THE FAVOURITE   ***

Yorgos Lanthimos

2018

IDEA:  The power balance in the court of Queen Anne is destabilized when a fallen noblewoman sets her sights on winning the queen's favor at all costs.

BLURB:  In the relatively narrow but rich canon of caustic, subversive costume dramas, The Favourite enters as a satisfying – if hardly groundbreaking – addition. Like its forebears, most notably The Draughtsman’s Contract, Lanthimos’s film is interested in the absurdity and savagery contained within the decorous walls of the noble elite, its pleasures coming from how impishly it scrapes away the lacquer of politeness that typically coats media representations of royal history. The opulence of Queen Anne’s palace is certainly a spectacle, but it would mean nothing to Lanthimos if it wasn’t also the marker of an excess as monstrous as the power plays and debauched rituals taking place amongst it. The Favourite doesn’t have to do much digging to find the volatility, malaise, and perversity festering in such posh quarters. They are amply apparent in Anne’s infirm body and hair-trigger rages, so volcanically and viscerally enacted by Olivia Colman; in her advisor Lady Sarah’s incorrigible bellicosity, wielded ruthlessly; in the bizarre japes of the parliament; and certainly in the actions of the usurper, Abigail, whose monomaniacal deceits know no bounds. While the dysfunction and skullduggery are predictably, nastily delightful, the film’s real achievement is in how it draws out pathos from the interpersonal warfare. Even when his merciless gaze threatens to level the characters into grotesque caricatures (not helped by the gratuitous and arbitrary-feeling fish-eye lenses), Lanthimos uses the triangulated relationship between Anne, Sarah, and Abigail to uncover complex layers of vulnerability and desire simmering behind the crown, ready to be exploited. If not exactly novel as bawdy historical satire, The Favourite nonetheless haunts as a tragicomic illustration of how easily our humanity is compromised when mechanisms of power overwhelm good sense.