In the land of the postmodern artefact

Rating: 6/10 (22 January 2019)

The Favourite is a period farce, exploiting the ills of a weak British monarch, Queen Anne, and the ambitions of two court ladies who are vying for power and money, using sex as a weapon.
So what is new? The ancient Greeks knew all about ambition or the scheming female mind. Shakespeare borrowed material avidly. Both the Greeks and the Great Bard knew their way around the human heart and navigated expertly past the Scylla and Charybdis of every passion imaginable, examining what is lowly and petty, but also what is noble and lofty. The old Masters were no fools; they knew the exact extent of the depthless pit to which humanity can stoop, from Medea to Lady Macbeth.
What is new is that the old Masters did not sweep everything under the carpet - even if that is a royal one. They did not equate all actions under the guise of mirth. They did not hide the vacuousness of ambition behind a royal costume, did not curtsy when faced with a cute line or a pair of blue eyes, did not hesitate when the time came to place a value on human action. They took their audiences to human hell, again and again. But they brought them back, too! The audience knew a fallen hero, but they also knew a hero who rose again in all the glory of redemption. There was a clear delineation between noble and low, divine and beastly, light and darkness.
The Favourite makes no such distinctions. Everything goes. In the labyrinth of the palace corridors, viewed through the distorted, elliptical lens of Lanthimos, who admittedly knows his stuff, the audience becomes witness to a dirty game of sex and power. And if we are left starving for a little moment of kindness and simplicity and pity, mainly for ourselves, a moment that might redeem humanity, Lanthimos will not relent. A persistent sound, reminiscent of that other vacuous film, Irreversible, which was built around the brutal sodomy of Monica Bellucci, reverberates persistently through the palace corridors and through our mind, sodomising again and again our need for a little hope for our human selves. The cacophony shreds to pieces any notion of redemption, as an ugly, fat, ailing, lost Queen Anne - chapeau to the performance by Olivia Colman - stumbles through the artfully ornate chambers of the palace, screaming: Where am I?
I will tell you where you are, your Highness. You are in the land of the postmodern artefact. The land where, as Jameson, the Marxist critic would say, a random cannibalisation of old styles is carried out with dexterity, a land where the Grand Masters and the old hierarchy of what is ariston and what isn't, are meticulously muddled up, dressed in pomp and duck races and a little seemingly innocuous fun, as men and women cannibalise each other senselessly. But the fun is not innocuous and the parody is but a pastiche, that fails to condemn that which it parodies and does not provide any alternatives for that which it supposedly cauterizes. Because it does not cauterize and therefore does not heal. The wound remains open, much like the wounds on the legs of the Queen, much like the pain for her seventeen dead babies or her need for a friend. And much like our need for the artist, to come along and clear up the mist of any doubt and present us with the perfect diamond of our humanity. We are more than that, more than a quick hand job in the dark, more than a desperate pleasuring with the tongue in return for a title of nobility or a handful of golden sovereigns. Much, much more than that. Art has an obligation to itself to go past the Scylla and the Charybdis, wave to the sirens from afar and then reach the rightful place of its destination.
That is the real palace, the real hegemony.