The Favourite

Synopsis: In early 18th century England, Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) occupies the British throne but is under the control of her close friend, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz). When the latter’s impoverished cousin, Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), arrives, she endears herself to Sarah but little does the latter  realize the effect it will have on her relationship with Anne.

The lives of Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots have been much filmed but not so that of Queen Anne who ruled between 1702 as the Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland and after their unification in 1707, of Great Britain, until her death in 1714. One of the virtues of Yorgos Lanthimos’s film is to have turned his attention to the unfortunate monarch who was plagued by myriad health issues and despite 17 pregnancies failed to leave a single heir, the only child she had that survived beyond infancy dying at the age of 11 (which makes thereferences to playing with "the children" or taking them for a walk rather odd).

Not that The Favourite is a dry history lesson. Rather it centres on the provocative premise that the unhappy queen enjoyed lesbian relations with both her childhood friend, Sarah, and Sarah’s cousin, Abigail, thus giving new meaning to the phrase “affairs of state”.  As the latter two become sworn enemies and fought to maintain control over Anne so the fortunes of the two political parties of the time, the Whigs and the Tories, the former favoured by Sarah, the latter by Abigail, shifted.

That is pretty much all there is to the plot of The Favourite and that, combined with the gorgeous production design that features fabulous costumes and richly accoutered interiors (much of the film was shot on location at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire and Hampton Court Palace, Richmond upon Thames) would have been quite enough had not Peter Greenaway given us The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) or Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988). Both films have similar time frames and settings to The Favourite and both revel in the otiose aristocracy’s predilection for sexual dalliance but also, to my mind at least, both were more compelling films..

Whilst Lanthimos makes similar use to Greenaway of period music and one of that director's favoured devices, chapter titles, as well as adding elements like the occasional use of a distorting fish-eye lens and inserting a surreal Greenaway-ish insert of a pudgy, bewigged but naked male being pelted with ripe tomatoes, the aesthetic artifice doesn’t seem to be enough. This perceived lack may simply because Greenway got there first but it may also be that Lanthimos doesn’t deliver the script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara with the archness it deserved in depicting the conniving which evidently constituted the lingua franca of the courts of the day.

Despite the great care having gone into getting the look of the film right, dramatically it lacks the atmosphere of intrigue and decadence which made Greenaway's and Frears' films so deliciously distinctive. Wiesz in particular delivers her barbed lines with a flatness that deprives her scenes of effect.  American-born Stone does a respectable turn as her rival but when the outrageously perruked and powdered Nicholas Hoult as Robert Harley is onscreen we get a taste of what the film should have been. Colman on the other hand is convincing as the beleaguered Anne.

It is ironic to ask this of the director of The Killing of A Sacred Deer (2017) et al, but if anything The Favourite needed to be a little more contrived. After all, the lesbian relationship between Abigail and Anne is unsupported speculation based on a scurrilous poem circulated by Sarah and there is apparently no evidence to suggest any goings-on between Sarah and Anne, so why not go for broke in this filmic fantasy?

The Favourite is a superb-looking film albeit with a certain tone of repugnance (each of the leads has a vomiting moment) that doesn't quite take its material to the pitch it could (or should) have had. 

FYI: Sarah Churchill was one of the ancestors of both Winston Churchill and Lady Diana Spencer. 

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