Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘The Favourite’ Is Deeply Hilarious And Fabulously Entertaining [Venice Review]

On three separate occasions during the first press screening of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ “The Favourite” in Venice, the audience spontaneously applauded. These instances were: 1) during a brilliantly anachronistic dance scene in which, to the unfunky strains of period-appropriate harpsichord music, Masham (Joe Alwyn) swings a solemn-faced Lady Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) horizontally around his waist before dipping into a full-on breakdance move down an aisle of cheering courtiers. 2) The look of helpless panic Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) wears when having been outmaneuvered in Parliament she decides to crumple into an immensely unconvincing swoon on the podium. And 3) The tiny rictus of distracted disgust on Abigail’s (Emma Stone) face after she offhandedly wanks off her new husband on their wedding night and wipes her hand on the bedclothes. All three moments are apotheoses of sorts, each being a distillation of all that’s great about each of the three women’s performances, but still, I’m going to gripe. Why only three? Why wasn’t everyone applauding every damn second of this extravagantly wonderful, deeply hilarious and fabulously entertaining movie?

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From the first explosively satisfying use of the word “cunt” to the final three-way comeuppance, “The Favourite” is a bawdy, bacchanalian beauty that manages to be both filthy-minded and a little heartbreaking, while among its embarrassing riches it boasts not one but three of what will undoubtedly be the best female performances of the year. Colman’s choleric Queen is the showstopper, with her stumping, gouty gait, her toddler’s tantrums and rare but self-lacerating moments of insight, and there are scenes in which she dashes mad-eyed, lost and terrified down the football pitch-sized corridors of her own palace/prison screaming “Where am I?” at dumbstruck footmen that deserve to be placed in the same pantheon as Daniel Day-Lewis drinking Paul Dano’s milkshake. But Stone’s deceptively innocent-looking schemer is a masterpiece of microaggressions and casual cruelties as well, and Weisz’s diamond-hard, onyx-black, straight-shooter Sarah is perhaps the most psychologically rich of all three. This is a story unapologetically about women, and their relationships to power and to one another (though props to Alwyn, Nicholas Hoult, and Mark Gatiss for so gamely sidelining themselves). Just like buses, it feels like we’ve waited an age for a decent female anti-hero to turn up and now three come along at once: Each of them is tragic, and each of them is ridiculous. Each has her own fatal flaw, and in no case is it a man. Let me just write that again because it was borderline orgasmic the first time: in no case is it a man.

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Sarah is the loyal, deviously intelligent wife of Lord Marlborough (Gatiss) the “brilliant soldier” who has been masterminding the British war against the French, but who needs his wife’s influence over the Queen to keep the campaign funded and to keep opposition leader Harley (Hoult, powdered and pinked under a wig of cumulo-nimbus hair) at bay. This has been a piece of elaborately iced cake for Sarah so far, as Queen Anne is quite besotted with her, and they are secretly lovers. Of course, this being a Yorgos Lanthimos film, and the director having at this stage something of a rep for misanthropy, we sort of expect there to be a moment when Sarah is revealed to be duplicitous and using the scatterbrained and feeble Queen for her own agenda. But although she is doing that, she is upfront about it: the surprise here is that their love affair, while clandestine and unequally weighted in terms of sensibility, is actually genuine. But into this halcyon arrangement slides Abigail, a cousin of Sarah’s fallen on hard times since her wastrel father lost her in a bet to “a German with a thin cock.” She comes looking for a job and gradually inveigles her way into the inner sanctum of the Queen’s confidence, driving splinters of distrust and jealousy into the relationship between Anne and Sarah in the process. The politicking and intriguing will eventually result in each woman overplaying her hand and becoming the architect of her own, differently-shaped downfall but rarely has a story with such archetypal notes of grand, world-altering tragedy been told with women at its center, and never has it also been so fucking funny.

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And it is also almost stupefyingly scrumptious to look at, with Robbie Ryan’s gorgeously rich lighting and crisp framing giving the exceptional production design, swamped in marquetry and tapestry and candlelit chestnut-colored paneling, an ineffably modern feel despite its baroque elegance. His striking use of fish-eye lenses gives us distorted, bendy horizons that put each woman in turn at the center of her own orbiting universe, while whip-pans and dramatic wide-angle tracking shots give the story a thrumming visual dynamism. Which is almost frustrating because so gorgeously intricate are the origami folds and luxuriant fabrics of Sandy Powell’s costuming, that you sort of want to slow the frame to see how they work, to marvel at the storytelling power of jangling earrings, rustling taffeta skirts ruched up around bucking hips, and to salute the instant minting of a lesbian fetish icon in Rachel Weisz slicked into a glistening black doublet and hunting breeches.

Overt lesbianism aside, however, to a casual observer, this is the “straightest” Lanthimos film to date — it’s certainly by far his most accessible and most straightforwardly enjoyable. But the lavish maximalism of “The Favourite” — all those scenes of orgiastic excess, of vomiting and pigeon shooting, of duck racing and rabbit petting and the sport of pelting chubby naked men with blood oranges — is simply another expression of the rigorous formalism for which he is better known. If there is a real philosophical difference between “The Favourite” and the likes of “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” or “Dogtooth” it’s that this time the director, who often empathizes as much with his characters as one might with amoebae in a petri dish, seems to have genuine affection for his flawed, flailing, fantastic women. By the film’s close, she who has the aptitude for power has none; she who wields power has no aptitude for it; and she who simply wanted stability and respectability is reduced, in a hilariously horrible final scene in which the administration of a leg massage is explicitly made to look like a blow job, to little more than a prostitute. So far, so very Lanthimos, only this time the irony is of the tragic kind, and the stinging, wicked wit is tinctured with wholly new notes of tenderness. [A]

Check out all our coverage from the 2018 Venice Film Festival here.