By Sandra Hall
THE FAVOURITE ★★★★ ½
(MA15+) 120 minutes
Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite is set in the early 18th century at the court of England's Queen Anne but don't expect any elaborate euphemisms and elegant circumlocutions.
Emma Stone executes a dramatic change in temperament and personality without taking one false step in The Favourite.Credit: AP
Lanthimos is really shaking up the conventions of the British costume drama with this film. The colours are muted and the sumptuousness of aristocratic life is underplayed in favour of the backstairs squalor and the grime that inevitably found its way into 18th century palaces, no matter how grand.
And the dialogue, co-written by Australian playwright and scriptwriter Tony McNamara, cuts straight to the heart of things while frequently cutting to the quick, as well. This Queen's court is no place for tender feelings. At times, she herself suffers from the sharp tongues of those closest to her.
Lanthimos' cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, catches it all, seizing every opportunity to treat you to a new angle on the court's tangled politics and claustrophobic atmosphere. One of his fondest ploys involves a wide lens that gives you the illusion of peering into a fishbowl. He also likes to shoot from below, accentuating the weird looks of a cast already caricatured by the mask-like make-up and curly powdered wigs of the period. And that's just the men. The women, in contrast, are allowed little artifice. The Queen is seen mostly in her nightgown, debilitated by the gout that has put her in a wheelchair.
And in this story, it's the women who matter. It centres on the rivalry between the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), the Queen's childhood friend and chief lieutenant – a woman of imperious wit and ruthless candour – and the Duchess' less fortunate cousin, Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), who begins her career at the palace as a chambermaid and winds up as Keeper of the Privy Purse.
The original story is by British lawyer and writer, Deborah Davis, who began work on it 20 years ago, using records of the correspondence between the three women. It was a bold move to hand it over to Lanthimos, a specialist in cerebral fantasies hard to fathom and tinged with horror. Yet his iconoclastic style really pays off. As well as being his biggest production so far, this is by far his most pleasurable, with three Oscar-worthy performances. Colman's Anne is poignant, exasperating and very funny – a child-woman trapped in a rapidly ageing body – while Weisz and Stone wage their tug-of-war over her affections with a sly cleverness that gradually grows into something much more poisonous. Stone, with a flawless English accent, executes the most dramatic change in temperament and personality without taking one false step. It's one of the finest films of the year.