Seeing The Favourite: an everyday story of chips and c***s
I’m currently stuck (well — looking for a part-time job and a flat, actually) in a tiny town in Kent with one tiny little cinema, but this week has finally been the week the film came here. And I saw it last night.
The background: a friend saw it last summer at some sort of private screening and was over-the-moon excited, and told me how much I would love it. I‘ve been eagerly looking forward to it ever since. Everyone I knew seemed uniformly to adore it. A couple of weeks ago, though, a close friend told me on the phone — I have to say, maybe even a little triumphantly — that one of his best friends had seen it and hated it — that the dialogue had anachronisms, that it just fell totally flat. A dismal failure. He also said something about how ‘Olivia Colman has become a National Treasure now…’
‘I’ll be really interested to hear what you think’, he said.
I was really excited to see the film at last. And it delivered. It delivered EVERYTHING.
Colman clearly magnificent. Emma Stone riveting from start to finish. I’m deciding I kind of love her. Rachel Weisz amazing, she seemed to sort of turn into a man. The men were coxcombs — they wear the make up, they simper, and in one case I gather the wig is in three parts. They are more or less peripheral. One is obsessed with a duck (no spoilers). They’re politicians, people who can be played, who are played, who must do what the Queen says. The real power-grabbing happens among our three totally believable women.
So many touchstone scenes. Colman as an abject Queen Anne, lying on the floor weeping in agony from her gout, foot up on an ottoman. A dance at a ball. Emma Stone as Abigail, in the woods, not being seduced by a young nobleman. The shooting. The Versailles-like excesses, 75 years before Versailles & in a different country. I read it like a cross between Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule and Marie Antoinette (of course, directed by a woman, as The Favourite was written by one). A friend on Facebook said it was ‘like the monstrous issue of a one-night stand between The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant’. ‘Feel strongly about this film!’, she added.
I hadn’t even remembered about the Peter Greenaway. Silly of me. As it happens, the costume designer has cited it as an influence, and of course it’s also behind the cinematography. The camera work is tricksy (another friend, also male, has ‘reservations about lens use’, but in fairness a woman friend agrees with him) — it works deliberately and expressively to create a sense of constant nervous movement. You’re never just located. You’re never really alone — there’s always a dark corner — people come from nowhere — you’re never safe and you’re never off-duty, and it is brutal. Slaps and beatings and assaults, and lies, and manipulation. (A door bursts open. ‘Are you here to seduce me, or rape me?’ ‘I beg your pardon, I’m a gentleman!’ ‘Oh, rape then’.) The angles are weird, close-ups from below, or hovering around the ceiling, and slightly whooshy or jerky — with occasional fisheye lenses that destroy all perspective. It’s a film you almost spy on.
The colours are rich and heavily art-directed. The costumes, mainly black and white, are not historically accurate (& weren’t trying to be). Quite rightly they won a BAFTA. All through it I was staring at the fabrics; it turns out the stylised scheme was a budgetary consideration, and the constraint throws up surprises all the way through.
The female leads were shot without make up.
And the performances are dazzling. Olivia Colman is profoundly moving as a woman who has lost 17 children — 14 as miscarriages or stillbirths, one not till he was 11 — and has 17 pet rabbits. She is less mad than King George, to whose film personification this has been compared.
The history is dodgy (an academic man’s complaint) but certainly no dodgier than that of any other film. It’s not ‘heritage cinema’. The point of the film is that it is creating something new out of something perennial. Like the other point-of-order objections I’ve heard, this one misses the point entirely. (As an aside, the film reminded me of Fanny Burney’s diaries from her time as lady in waiting to Queen Charlotte in the 1780s. I wondered if perhaps someone had read them.)
The dialogue does have anachronisms. But like the ones in Marie Antoinette, they aren’t slips — they’re a strategy. They’re part of how the film tells us it’s making something new, something it expressly wants us to see ourselves in. There’s a ZAP! early on when one of the women hisses: ‘Cunt.’ This happens a couple of times. It’s a safe bet that people at court swore at each other, just as everyone does and always has.
One thing I think men might be missing is an experience. Of the 100 top-grossing films of 2018, four per cent were directed by women. Fifteen per cent were written by them. Twenty-four per cent of all protagonists were women. Almost half of all films don’t pass the three qualifiers of the Bechdel Test, which are:
1. It has at least two named women in it
2. They talk to each other
3. About something besides a man.
Ten per cent of films pass none of these. This is something women feel all the time. We’re so used to it that we forget we’re feeling it, but we are. We are constantly being presented with a vision of the world that we must learn — it isn’t ours already. As different as we are. So here we have a movie — serious, art-house but popular, intellectually and emotionally complex — in which ALL the power is with the women. In the royal court — where women in both history and cinema are either trophies, or ‘scheming’ behind the scenes, or both — here, we ARE the scene. It doesn’t even have to be made a big thing of. We don’t have to die in the end as the logical conclusion of exercising our will. And apparently, we’re feeling the difference.
When the film ended — quite an abrupt ending — I started to laugh. I laughed through the credits, until all of a sudden I was crying, really crying, shoulders shaking, with tears streaming down my face. Had to pull myself together, and then went to the ladies’ room to sort myself out.
The atmosphere in the ladies’ room was electric. No one was saying much — just stunned women, ordinary, several in their 60s, all with an air of inner peace and joy around them. Queueing, I think we were all together and not wanting to break the bubble. Then another woman burst through the door, looked around and then straight at me and said with a huge smile: ‘WHAT A FILM!’
Back in the foyer I just felt I had to speak. I turned to an older lady in sensible slacks & wire glasses etc, in her mid-late 60s maybe, and said, ‘You know? This is a kind of movie that’s usually about men. And this time it’s about us.’ ‘That’s just what I was thinking’, she said.
Outside, I called my friend Natalia, and walking down the dark, deserted street told her all about it. I was just describing the fishbowls and the shots from below — ‘It’s all about dislocation’ — when suddenly, a guy sitting on a bench eating chips said: ‘And the word cunt!’
I stopped — ‘You were in the movie!’ — and he said, ‘Here, have a chip’, so I got off the phone and we sat and had a conversation about it until his chips were finished and then someone rang him. We were both excited, both talking at once, and both agreed that it might take a few viewings and a few years to understand what exactly happens in this film. That in itself is exciting. And whatever is happening in the film, just look what’s happening around it. I give it 11/10.
