Critics reviews

The patriarchal circuits through which a film moves curtail the radicality of its use of abjection, especially when this is used by men as an aesthetic tool. Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) uses the abject status of its central character to cursorily present a challenge to sex and gender categories, but its feminism is superficial. Here abjection is without tenderness; corporality met by patriarchal coldness.

The Favourite is perverse and sadomasochistic, a gratifying evocation of doddering power and the jockeying that swarms it in decline.

Take a good, open-minded look at The Favourite in this light – a peculiarly Australian light – and you’ll see the traces (intended or not) of the agonising power games in Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade (1996), the crazy historical anachronisms in Young Einstein (1988), and the queer play with gender roles underlying the work of P.J. Hogan or Stephan Elliott.

What can an extreme wide angle do for a “fun” but ultimately flat period drama filled with lusty intrigue, female rivalry, the machinations of state power, and some quirky animal stuff? The answer is nothing. Not that such a lens couldn’t work; it’s just that Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t do anything remotely interesting with it.

It’s captivating and propulsive, animated by committed performances and flamboyant cinematography replete with fish-eye and low-angle shots. It has the feel of a Vermeer painting come to life.

Often accused of ham-fisted endings, Lanthimos triumphs here. Deflating our delight, he puppeteers a rollicking game only to unveil it as futile.

[Lanthimos] sets aside his taste for the surreal social parable to articulate a modernist approach to costume drama: a turn from fantasy to history in which the usual quietism and monotony of the acting is replaed by an expressive tragicomic modulation (elevated to pure virtuosity by Olivia Colman as England’s Queen Anne).

He’s perhaps the last director one would expect to find working on a period costume drama featuring real historical figures. But The Favourite gratifyingly proves that Lanthimos can put his mordantly idiosyncratic stamp on even this staidest of genres.

The two funniest movies I saw in theaters this year [were Barry Lyndon and The Favourite], even if Lyndon always makes me cry. Gorgeously designed and arrestingly lensed tales of occasional scoundrels who will claw the best they can over anyone who gets between them and a higher lot in society. "Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."

I laughed along at the many jokes and glorious one-liners scattered throughout – but watching Colman as she nervously allows Abigail to play with her rabbits before opening up about her tragedies and finally introducing the furry pets as “my children” was a tear-jerking moment I shall treasure for a long while.

Shooting a lot of this flawlessly period film on 6mm fisheye lenses, Yorgos found a way, that doesn’t feel like a “way” at all, to shoot this austere story with stinging freshness. To call it “modern” is obvious, but the awesome paradox here is that it feels both hyper-modern and absolutely period at the same time. It is camera obscura, realized. It’s Vermeer moving.

I have never seen a film like The Favourite: a story about three bad women—bad in very different, very interesting ways—whose badness both makes and breaks the relationships between them.