Play to Win

Rating: 7/10 (5 July 2020)

Of my many projects, one of the least likely to ever see light of day, is a chronological History of the World compiled from feature films. If it does, however, The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) just ensured a prominent entry with The Favourite.
The Favourite is the 7th feature film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Greek critic darling with a distinct surrealist/absurdist style whose recent efforts (The Lobster, 2015, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, 2017) have been showered with prizes and nominations. The Favourite covers different territory but is set to top its predecessors in terms of recognition, I suspect (not having seen the aforementioned films) deservedly.
The Favourite tells the true story of Abigail Hill ( Emma Stone), an impoverished young lady of gentry extraction, and of how she finds her way into service in the kitchen of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) and thence eventually and very eventfully into her favour, to the dismay and aggressive opposition of the previous favourite Sarah, Duchess of Malrborough (Rachel Weisz), the background being, as mentioned above, the War of the Spanish Succession and the fights of the pro-war Whigs and anti-war (as the landed gentry they represented bore the brunt of the financing) Tories for the kings ear, often though the favourites´ voices.
If memory serves, George Clooney´s The Men who Stare at Goats, (2009) started with a caption that went something like "more than you think of the following actually happened". I bet that applies to The Favourite, the many pleasures of which include a seamless blend of 18th Century English palatial courtesies and double entendres with crass sexual profanities, although I suspect the otherwise perfect script still errs on the side of pudency in this regard. Other (pleasures) include the high drama/black comedy register Lanthimos chose for this period piece, his first, in many aspects reminiscent of Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975, the luscious asphyxiated baroque interiors, the pervasive clavichord soundtrack, the stuffy wigs and makeup of men and women, more on this below) with a (mercifully) slight whiff of Fellini (members of the royal household making it an afternoon´s entertainment of throwing ripe tomatoes at a naked wigged man, he cavorting in slow motion like a hairy oversized Botticelli cherub trying simultaneously to dodge the tomatoes and hide his privates) and a perhaps unconscious nod at Fritz Lang (women with facial scars, but maybe that´s just me). And not least the high octane histrionics of the main characters, a perfect schoolgirl triangle in an adult (well...) world. Bette Davies and Joan Crawford in their heyday wouldn´t have topped Stone and Weisz, and no Golden Age parallel occurs for Colman, but her heartbroken half-demented disease-ridden tantrum-prone Queen Anne doesn't steal the show (the other two don´t allow it) but adds to it much more than its share.
The Favourite is a rollercoaster ride of Shakespearean proportions, its power like that of the aforementioned Barry Lindon, deriving from the very same proposition: what it takes to go "up", or back "up", in life in a cripplingly stratified society.