Funny, smart, dark, irreverent, cruel and immoral - this movie is everything but still none of them. {criti-cally reviews}

Rating: 8/10 (3 April 2020)

The favorite is director Yorgos Lanthimos seventh film, and a good one too. It's one of those masterpieces that people either love or hate, there's no in-between, and looking at the reviews on IMDB, you can clearly this movie for it is. A Masterpiece.
This is a merciless satire about a love triangle set in British Monarchy times, with everything else (class, gender, love, lust, duty, loyalty, partisan politics, patriarchal hegemony, and women behaving appallingly just like men) just the background noise against which that triangle plays out.
It is the story of the largely forgotten British monarch Queen Anne (played by Olivia Colman in an Oscar-winning performance), who unfortunately is most remembered today for her frail health and the little interest she had in governing. She would spend most of her time in organizing odd games and playing with her pet rabbits. The country is effectively ruled by Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (played by Rachel Weisz), who through unrelenting scheming has cemented herself as Queen Anne's advisor and, in moments of need, her lover.
When Sarah's distant cousin Abigail Hill (played by Emma Stone), washes up on the shores of the grand palace she lives in with the Queen, her crippling insecurity convinces her to take Abigail down, lest her position be threatened.
Abigail, who belongs to a lower class than Sarah, is initially forced to work as a scullery maid, but soon begins to make inroads into the Queen's inner circle. She begins by showing the Queen kindness, because that is what Anne seems to be yearning for the most. But later, she sacrifices her body in her pursuit of power.
The ending, while an ambiguous one, symbolizes the Queen's loneliness and struggle for control, as that final shot of Abigail rubbing her leg fades into rabbits. The first half is very, very funny, and the end is very, very dark, with the last shot one of the most haunting images one can see.
The film's most salient theme, is the dynamic of gender politics. For starters, It's headlined by three actresses (something which is still rare enough as to be notable), whilst the men are portrayed as petty, vainglorious idiots. It truly doesn't think much of its men and it allows the guys to make a fool of themselves - which is something you can always count on. Men, in general, are background players, existing only to be mocked, exploited, and duped - with their ridiculous wigs and heavy makeup, they exist only to support the women.
Its central female characters do not bear any resemblance to the submissive pushovers that men are more likely to pursue and consequentially, less likely to feel threatened by. The Favourite is in many ways an exploration of this power, and more particularly power in relation to women. While men are more likely to fuel their egos in similar situations, the film seems to suggest that with women, it has more to do with survival. However, what's especially interesting about the film's depiction of gender is that the world of women is anything but a utopia. Yes, it's relatively free of toxic masculinity and the male gaze, but in most other aspects, there's no real difference between the matriarchy and the patriarchy. Sure, the women are much smarter than the men who surround them, but they are no less greedy or cruel. At the film's post-première press conference at the Venice Film Festival, Lanthimos explained, "what we tried to do is portray women as human beings. Because of the prevalent male gaze in cinema, women are portrayed as housewives, girlfriends...Our small contribution is we're just trying to show them as complex and wonderful and horrific as they are, like other human beings." Similarly, when asked by the Hollywood Reporter if a film about females treating each other badly might be considered a setback in a post #MeToo era, Colman explained, "How can it set women back to prove that women fart and vomit and hate and love and do all the things men do? All human beings are the same. We're all multifaceted, many-layered, disgusting and gorgeous and powerful and weak and filthy and brilliant. That's what's nice. It doesn't make women an old-fashioned thing of delicacy."
The script is phenomenal and treats the characters very consistently but never one-dimensionally, by clearly showing their motivations but also portraying them realistically as humans. The humor and the satire really works, from the absurdist touches like the duck races to the funny and witty dialogues, like when Sarah tells the Queen she looks like a badger and the Queen agrees. The comradery and rivalry between Emma Stone's character and Rachel Weisz's character-both who, gave the most dexterous performances of this entire year-was just too much fun to take in. The atmospherical tone of this movie also something that can easily win one over. It reputed like an old-fashioned, 1-on-1, battle of the minds movie, just with touches of Lanthimos's typical synthetic stylizations. It's the cherry on the top of this shrewd satire.
In terms of acting, there really are no words to describe just how good Colman is. Utterly inhabiting the character, she is able to elicit empathy mere moments after behaving thoroughly shamefully, communicating a sense of both tragic inevitability and a childlike refusal to accept reality. The character could easily have been a grotesque villain or a pitiful broken shell, but Colman finds a nobler middle ground, straddling both interpretations without fully committing to either, moving from one to the other seamlessly throughout the film. Yes, she can be a horrible person with appalling manners and questionable hygiene, but she is also deeply lonely, a survivor who has lost 17 children in childbirth, a woman whose health has made her old before her time, a tragic figure too naïve to see how badly she is being manipulated by Sarah and Abigail. Rather than trying to downplay the contradictory facets of the character, Colman leans into them, illuminating Anne's humanity amongst her least appealing characteristics, and finding both wit and pathos in a character whose mercurial nature and excessive neediness could easily have rendered her the film's antagonist. It truly is one of the finest on-screen performances in a long time.
As one would expect from Lanthimos, the film is aesthetically flawless, with many of the compositions having the appearance of a fête galante painting, so meticulously integrated are Sandy Powell's costume design, Fiona Crombie's production design, and Robbie Ryan's cinematography. Powell's costumes are historically inaccurate, but thematically revealing, with the situation of the characters at any given moment directly influencing the design, especially in relation to Abigail as she climbs the social ladder. While Abigail's transformation from maid to confidante has an element of nouveau riche tackiness, Sarah is dressed mostly in dark, masculine hues; almost like combat gear, which makes sense for a character that always seems to think she's on a battleground. Anne, meanwhile, is like an overgrown child whose clothes are still picked out by her parents. The black-and-white color scheme of much of the wardrobe contrasts magnificently with Crombie's predominantly brown production design, with the actors effortlessly standing out from the backgrounds.
Of Ryan's photography, perhaps the most impressive feat is that, despite the many scenes tracking characters through rooms, up stairs, and out doorways, there's not a single Steadicam shot anywhere in the film. He also makes copious use of 6mm fish-eye lenses, which distort the spaces the characters occupy whilst also showing much more of the environment than a normal lens, creating the sense of characters lost within an overload of background visual detail. As with most of Lanthimos' work, the film also uses natural light, which makes for some stunning candle-lit night-time compositions, partially recalling some renaissance paintings.
A savage morality play, a camp comedy of manners, a Baroque tragedy, an allegorical study of the corruptive nature of power - it's all of these and yet none of them. And that is exactly why one should watch it.