This was history then? This is comedy now?

Rating: Null/10 (11 February 2019)

After seeing films at least weekly for decades, my wife and I wandered into this one with the barest inkling--only half a review from a NYC daily which led me to think it was a historical film set in the reign of Queen Anne.
I was expecting something about the Stuart pretender and the Hanovers, The War of the Spanish Succession, Marlborough and his wife, the duchess of Marlborough, Mistress Masham, yes--they were there--at least the ladies--Whigs and Tories, barely--Swift , Pope, Addison and Steele--so much for the history. But the sets were lavish. I spent most of my time looking at the paintings on the walls as well as the sets and the furniture. The actors were alright--not that they had so very much on their mind, other than crude ambition and lust for power, not very much more subtle than in any soap opera.
What was new was the bald viciousness of men and women at every opportunity. It was like watching schoolboy bullies--male and female, acting out their crudest impulses at every opportunity,
I cannot believe that that language would have been tolerated if spoken by a man to a man in even in the bawdy Restoration and these years which followed it--if a man had used it on a man, he would have been whipped , or been skewered from gizzard to groin--let alone uttered by a subject to a monarch--and ladies to each other , as well as to men. More fakery.
Apparently, some of the public found the pelting of a fat, naked eunuch with oranges as hilarious as the players in the scene pretended it was.
There was only one thing which seemed to really interest this film maker: that was the sex between the duchess (who was, in reality, if not in this film, the wife of the most influential Englishman of his era) and the queen and the way in which her protegÃ©e took her place between the sovereign's bloated legs.
All this lesbian play--how historical was all this? Or is this another example of the displacement of a set of homoerotic male fantasies projected by a male author onto the screen in female guise?
One motif runs through it: Mud.