Triumph or pure tosh?
Its stars swept the board at the Baftas – but it’s leaving audiences bitterly divided. So is The Favourite a . . .
LAUDED by critics, nominated for ten Oscars, The Favourite is the talking point of the season. On Sunday it added to the tally with seven Baftas, including Best Actress for Olivia Colman. The historical comedy tells the ‘true’ story of Queen Anne and her ladies-in-waiting, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham. However, many cinema-goers were disappointed, as reflected on the Daily Mail letters page. Here, two writers offer their very different take.
MThis is an entertaining and irreverent period drama with its own keen sense of the absurd. It is a farce, complete with racing lobsters, lavish feasts, feuds and poisoned chalices; a full-blown raspberry syllabub rippled with blood.
Expect the unexpected, such as 18thcentury characters using modern dialogue (‘I have a thing for the weak’), kitchen staff wearing denim uniforms and harpsichords plucking out an Elton John song, as well as a handel composition.
It’s a romp sans pomp, even if I also had my tiny doubts right at start. Women in hooped skirts whisking along palace corridors deploying the C-word?
A duchess climbing into her big game britches to shoot pigeons on the lawn and then deciding the next offensive in the war against the French?
What fresh hell was this; please God not another feminist reclamation project appropriating history to fit with the usual fashionable fem-agenda?
however, in the end The Favourite is not like that at all. As one of the characters puts it; sometimes a lady just likes to have a little fun.
It is certainly wildly different and more amusing than the usual period drama clichés, which tend to feature maidens in muslin blushing prettily as they wait to go to a ball, then marrying Colin Firth and crying ‘ fiddlesticks!’ before dying of consumption. Instead we have three strong souls battling for supremacy in the queen’s bedchamber — and three great actresses to do them justice.
Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is on the throne, assisted by her glamorous friend, confidante and lover Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz). Enter Abigail ( Emma Stone), a distant cousin of Sarah’s. She is a fallen noblewoman who seeks to improve her lot — ultimately to usurp her cousin.
These scrappy low jinks are baked into a superior plot, evolving into a complex female triangle where love, sex and duty curdle into rivalry and revenge.
The queen is portrayed as a gouty bulimic swaddled in candlewick who keeps 17 pet rabbits in her boudoir, one for each of her lost babies. (In real life, Queen Anne was pregnant 18 times, with her longest-surviving child dying when he was 11 years old.)
‘But rabbits weren’t kept as pets until the 19th century!’ the purists will cry. Does that really matter? We cannot know Anne’s state of mind regarding this endless, sad trench of miscarriages, stillbirths and tiny bereavements. Yet here, the bunnies bear testimony to her inner hurts in an oddly moving way, in a film that does not strive for veracity — just to hit a high note midway between history and fiction.
As Anne deals with her loss, her court is populated by grotesques with towering pompadours, smears of vermillion lipstick bleeding across their cruel sneers. And that’s just the men.
Entering this hostile world, our powdered girl power trio must navigate for authority and survival.
The Favourite may have its faults, but director Yorgos Lanthimos has created something unique. For once, we are not looking at events through the dusty prism of a historical telescope, trained on the cliches of the past.
Instead, we experience contemporary life as Queen Anne and her court might have done; as something exciting, daring and wild.
No wonder all three leads have been nominated for Oscars; Colman as Best Actress and Weisz and Stone both for Best Supporting Actress.
Who does it best? Weisz’s performance is powerful and controlled, shot through with humour. We understand that despite everything, the Duchess had a sense of responsibility and truly did care for her queen.
Stone’s character indulges in dangerous liaisons of her own, but never lets us forget where Abigail came from — and how close she is to plummeting back into that hell with the other ‘scabrous whores’.
Yet the standout performance comes from Colman. her Queen Anne is, by turns, capricious, needy, pathetic, autocratic, childish, tragic, a mess and a monster.
Somehow, Colman manages to portray all this effortlessly, without turning Anne into a caricature. In this game of thrones, she is the Queen in more ways than one.
And if you can get over the rabbits and the swearing, I hope that you will agree. Y ADVICE to those who are still thinking of a trip to see The Favourite? Don’t go if you’re looking for a history lesson and slavish attention to facts.