QUEEN OLIVIA IS A RIGHT ROYAL HOOT!
THE 75th Venice Film Festival has begun very promisingly. Wednesday’s opening movie, reviewed in these pages yesterday, was the engrossing and moving First Man, about the life of Neil Armstrong leading up to his momentous 1969 moonwalk.
The pick of yesterday’s festival films offered more cinematic pleasure. The Favourite, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and set in the debauched, corrupt court of England’s Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) while the War of the Spanish Succession rages on the continent, is an absolute hoot.
Colman, of course, is soon to play Queen Elizabeth II in the Netflix series The Crown. It’s safe to say that this regal outing doesn’t give us much of a preview. Her Anne bears more resemblance to another Elizabeth: Miranda Richardson’s Queenie in the TV sitcom Blackadder. She is childlike, tantrum-prone, full of self-pity, and in need of constant nursemaiding at the hands of her lifelong but infinitely more glamorous friend, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz).
At the start of the film, Anne shows Sarah a model of the fabulous palace she is giving her and her husband, the Duke (Mark Gatiss), to mark his famous triumph at the Battle of Blenheim.
But that victory didn’t actually end the war, Sarah points out. ‘Oh, I did not know that,’ replies the Queen, who is not only dim, but also crippled with gout, overweight and given to eating until she throws up. Her courtiers might flatter her absurdly, but the camera does not.
Colman, hobbling along the corridors of her palace (actually Hatfield House, in Hertfordshire), gives an uproarious and decidedly un-vain performance.
Weisz is similarly excellent, playing Sarah at times almost like the thigh-slapping principal boy in a panto. So is Emma Stone as Abigail Hill, an ambitious, conniving servant who inveigles her way first into Sarah’s affections, then into the Queen’s.
Abigail comes from an aristocratic family, indeed her father was Sarah’s cousin. But he was also irredeemably feckless. ‘When I was 15 my father lost me in a card game,’ says Abigail, matter- offactly. Sarah condescendingly tosses her a job as a kitchen maid.
However, Abigail has not arrived at court to scrub floors. When she uses her foraging skills to make a herbal treatment for the Queen’s gout, she begins her inexorable rise in the court hierarchy.
Then she discovers that there is a very secret dimension to the relationship between Sarah and the Queen, who even have pet names, Mrs Freeman and Mrs Morley, for each other.
How can she use this knowledge to her advantage?
By this stage it has occurred to the audience that the film’s title might not refer to Weisz’s calculating Duchess, but to Stone’s socialclimbing servant. Yet Sarah will still take some supplanting as the power behind the throne.
She is politically astute, a vital ally to the Prime Minister (James Smith), as he seeks to raise taxes to subsidise the war effort, which is led in the field by her heroic husband.
Her sworn enemy is the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Harley
(Nicholas hoult), who hopes to outflank sarah by recruiting abigail as a spy.
handily, his protégé colonel Masham ( Joe alwyn) fancies abigail rotten. ‘have you come to seduce me or rape me?’ she asks, as he slips into her room one night.
‘I am a gentleman,’ Masham replies, indignantly. ‘so, rape then,’ she mutters. all this bawdiness and chicanery would be entertaining enough, but it is given a raucous spin by Lanthimos, working from a very funny original screenplay by Deborah Davis and tony McNamara.
he has a ball, in one marvellous scene quite literally, with the baroque fashions of the time — all those powdered wigs, rouged cheeks and fake beauty spots. the Greek director has worked with colman and Weisz before, on 2015’s the Lobster. I didn’t blow rhapsodies at that film, as many did, and preferred his 2017 picture the Killing Of a sacred Deer. But this is his best yet; Lanthimos has an eye for the grotesque that suits overt comedy even better than it does quirky horror.
he is aided by a whimsical chambermusic score, and by Robbie Ryan’s clever cinematography, which sometimes uses a fish-eye lens to wreak further distortion on the film’s twisted characters.
the basic framework of the story is entirely factual. abigail Masham, as she became, really did topple sarah churchill as the Queen’s favourite, if not perhaps as ruthlessly as she does here.
But cheekily and hilariously, Lanthimos also sprinkles the story with anachronisms, including a dance that is more saturday Night Fever than house of stuart and had the Venice audience guffawing loudly.
there is poignancy, though, beneath all the fun. abigail finds a way to anne’s heart partly by playing with the 17 rabbits the Queen keeps in her bedchamber as substitutes for the 17 children she has lost.
Yet a later act of callous cruelty reminds us that abigail does not have her sovereign’s best interests at heart, in fact barely has a heart at all.
the Duchess, for all her machinations, genuinely does. at its own heart, this is a film about friendship.
THE Favourite opens in the UK on January 1 next year.