MOVIES
BY R I C K L E V I N
A ROYAL PAIN
Director Yargos Lanthimos takes on the
court of Queen Anne in The Favourite
n his 2015 film The Lobster, Greek director Yargos
Lanthimos evoked a haunting vision of social engi-
neering run amok, where unattached patrons of a “Ho-
tel” are forced to couple up under threat of, basically,
death. In this weird updating of Kafka’s penal colony,
people living the singles lifestyle represent a terrible threat
to social order, and enforced romance is seen as a means of
suppressing the chaos of individuality. So much for bach-
elorhood, folks.
As I wrote of The Lobster at the time: “Lanthimos utterly
subverts the dichotomies of classic dystopias by creating a
world of pervasive repression — there is literally no exit
here. Whether a subject of the Hotel, a renegade in the wild
or a denizen of the city, where couples share a common
trait, everyone is under a kind of emotional lockdown that
is insidiously enforced person to person.”
This brings to mind the work of theorist Michel
Foucault, who suggested that fascism does not descend
from monolithic structures of government but, rather, takes
place in the insidious exchange of power between solitary
people at all levels of society, where oppression and
psychic violence become slippery intangibles, hard to hold
and harder to combat. Fascism, in this vision, is merely the
coagulation of a moral and civic collapse already existing
at the ground level of everyday life — i.e., Trump not
as cause but, rather, as ultimate expression of something
deeply wrong with us all.
Lanthimos’ next film, The Killing of the Sacred Deer
(2017), provided an even subtler and more disturbing
look at how power and corruption seep into the stuff of
mundane existence. In this darkest of dark comedies — a
strange and gloomy mash-up of Greek mythology and the
Old Testament story of Isaac and Abraham — the secrets
and lies that protect the father of a well-to-do family come
back with a vengeance that is at once utterly secular and
fantastically supernatural. Justice is always cosmic, the
film hints, and nobody in this life really gets away with
shit.
To all appearances, Lanthimos’ new film, The Favourite,
is a complete departure from his previous two offerings: A
grotesque, darkly comic period piece based on the early
18th-century court of Queen Anne, set during Britain’s
war with France. Mannered and decadent, opulent and
I
RACHEL WEISZ AND
OLIVIA COLMAN IN
THE FAVOURITE
rotten at the fringes, the movie envisions the monarchy
as a carnal, claustrophobic tangle of petty intrigues and
political jockeying, often plied with a twist of orgiastic lust
and sexual aggression. Turns out Jonathan Swift, who gets
an off-screen nod as a journalist in the film, was right after
all: The royals are vile assholes.
At the core of the film is a romantic triangle: the queen
(the wonderful Olivia Colman), a gouty, pouty tyrant given
to adolescent outbursts and unbridled appetites, but not
totally lacking in cunning; her lover, Sarah the Duchess
of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz, wicked), whose intimacies
with Her Highness grant her a certain amount of political
influence; and Sarah’s cousin Abigail (Emma Stone,
a revelation), a woman of fallen standing who slowly,
steadily insinuates herself into the queen’s confidences.
This is not a nice movie, and the women at the center
of it are not nice — in fact, they’re rather cunts, an epithet
hurled with such unabashed regularity that it achieves an
aura of aggrieved courtly reverence. The more bankrupt
wing of feminist ideology would seem to imply that women
are inherently better than men: more caring, less violent,
less tempted to abuse power and exploit the downtrodden.
Lanthimos’ film, co-written by Deborah Davis and Tony
McNamara, flies in the face of such romanticized hogwash,
granting actual respect to its female characters — not as
types, neither victim nor hero nor whore nor Madonna, but
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as actual people with actual agency.
That each of these three characters employs her agency
to completely selfish and reprehensible ends is invigorating
— because it reveals the truth that at the core of power and
corruption is the tricky issue of character, which does not
fit neatly into any prefabricated category of identity like
gender, or race, or any of that. In this sense, The Favourite
is a truly feminist film, on par with the unreconstructed
realism of Debra Granik’s 2010 masterpiece Winter’s Bone.
More than that, it is a visually sumptuous, morally
repulsive and wildly funny portrait of the way political
power congeals around the greed, narcissism and fear of its
participants, creating a cycle of corruption and collateral
damage that replicates itself through sheer inertia, until —
rivalry upon rivalry — it unleashes an avalanche of evil
down through the ages.
The film’s final scene is baffling until taken in just this
context. The underlying misery of power traps even those
exercising it, thereby reproducing itself, its tyrannies and it
tyrants, like rabbits rutting.
Taken altogether, The Lobster, The Killing of the Sacred
Deer and The Favourite form a seamless triptych of power
and the insidious ways it expresses itself — not at the level
of ideology, but in the interstices of human relationships,
where the seeds of dishonesty and greed first get planted.
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