The Favourite

The Favourite - The Distorted Reality of Power

"Sometimes a Lady likes to have some fun."

 The Period Drama is a very traditional and dignified genre. It's a genre that usually portrays the lives of monarchs and aristocrats, normally with a certain dignity and romanticization. The word "aristocrat" comes from the Greek word "ἄριστος" (aristos), which means "excellent". But were aristocrats really that excellent, as the name implies? Were they better than the rest of us commoners? In a corrosive satire, Yorgos Lanthimos bluntly shows us the true nature of these so-called "excellent people". Using the dignified characteristics of the Period Drama against it, Lanthimos shows us the rot hidden behind the glossy exterior of those who possess power and those who seek it, showing us the ugly truth of power. The Favourite is a film about powerful people and is against them by showing us their strange, distorted reality - a reality filled with sweets, parties, and riches, which directly contrasts with the chaotic, crumbling, famine-infested world outside of it. When watching this film, one may question, "did anything change since then?" We look back to the past to understand the present. And, in the present, power is still power. 

 In The Favourite, we follow a period of the reign of Queen Anne of England, who is played fantastically by Olivia Colman. Colman's performance is one of the performances from last year that I am most obsessed about. Everything about it is done to perfection, with brilliant nuance in every emotion. It is almost nearly impossible not to empathize with her. Because of her outstanding performance, we are lead to understand this extremely complex character - and I'll get to this in a bit. We follow her as she is played like a puppet by her close friend, Lady Sarah Marlborough, who is played by Rachel Weisz, in one of the best performances of her career - which is saying something. One day, a distant cousin of Sarah, Abigail Hill, who is played brilliantly by Emma Stone, arrives at the palace and starts working there as a maid. Slowly, she starts to gain the favor of Lady Sarah and, consequently, of the Queen by using her charm and wit. Soon, Lady Sarah and Abigail start to compete between each other in what can only be described as a bizarre love triangle - a relentless game of power that will eliminate either one and put the other in one of the most powerful positions in one of the most powerful European empires of the time, with the Queen in the center of this conflict.

 Firstly, I would like to point out the aspect that is the most immediately noticeable and probably the most central in this film - the fact that traditional gender roles are switched. Period dramas are usually centered around the games of power played by men, with women being mostly sidelined or presented as unimportant to those games. This is completely subverted and switched around in this film. It's the women who are shown in the center stage now. Men have their wars, but it's women who fight the real political battles and are the ones who are in control, pulling the strings in the backstage. Men are portrayed as futile and vain, being caricatured with excessive makeup and wigs, and are too preoccupied with gossip and sex. Their machismo is presented as a weakness and blindness for the games played by women, who are able to ignore their sexual urges, keep their blood cool and focus on what really matters. This is most noticeable in the scenes with Abigail and Masham, the man who will eventually marry her, played by Joe Alwyn. While all he thinks about is to have sex with her, she is more concerned with planning out her strategy and dethroning Lady Sarah and replacing her beside the Queen. One of the scenes that stuck the most in my mind and I think is the one that better portrays this is the scene of their wedding night. We see her worrying about how to keep in power having no knowledge of Lady Sarah's location while all Masham worries about is the sex, demanding for her to please him. To shut him up, she starts masturbating him, paying no attention to it, instead focusing on what's going to be her next move. This image of her looking into the distance - the future - focused on her thoughts, while we see Masham in the background indulging in his sexual pleasure is a great metaphor of our patriarchal society and the women navigating in it.

 Which leads me to the difference in these two very interesting female characters - Lady Sarah and Abigail. These two women represent two facets of power - power for survival and power for political gain. Lady Sarah wants to have hold of her position near the Queen so that she can pull the political strings in favor of her party - The Whigs. On the other hand, Abigail wants to rise to power, not to pull political strings, but to secure her survival. She is not interested in politics. The political strings she pulls are done with a mere objective to benefit her chances of survival - it's just a "happy coincidence" when her benefit coincides with a political party. As she tells Lord Harley, the leader of the Tory Party, played incredibly by Nicholas Hoult, "I am on my side, always". She may pull political strings, but that is not the final objective of her search for power. It is also worth pointing out, the relationship that both have with the Queen. The relationship that Lady Sarah has with the Queen seems to be more based on love and romance, although, seeing the political interests of Lady Sarah, one may doubt the truth of her statements of love for the Queen. The relationship between Abigail and the Queen seems to be more obvious to us to be more based on Abigail's interest in survival. Abigail only starts her affair with the Queen because she realizes that that might be beneficial for her survival, not because she has feelings for the Queen.

 This isn't to say that one is nobler than the other, mostly because power can never be noble. As Yorgos Lanthimos shows us in this story of backstabbings, poisonings, and betrayals, there is an inherent rot in power. Power is everything but noble and no objective towards which one acquires power can ever have nobility. Power always favors the interest of one in spite of the other and requires a battle, a war. In this story, power is represented by the Queen (as in absolute monarchies, power lies entirely in the Monarch), with Lady Sarah and Abigail representing the two sides of the war for power. Because of this, in a certain contradictory way, we are led to sympathize with the Queen, who is probably the most interesting character of the film. She was born into power and she didn't have to fight for it (mostly because she is power herself), but she certainly didn't ask for it - although she draws some pleasure from it, as she says, "It is fun to be Queen sometimes". Despite her ostentatious lifestyle, she has a miserable life. She's gout-ridden and tortured by a terrible past. She is also very child-like in her behavior - which is a perfect metaphor of the nature of power - and this is because of the way she is spoiled by everyone around her, who never allows her to become a true adult with her own opinions and thoughts - because who would want a Queen with brains that wouldn't allow herself to be influenced? We are slowly lead to understand this tragic character. The scene when she reveals to Abigail - and us - that she owns 17 rabbits because of the 17 children she lost - mostly through miscarriages - is absolutely heartbreaking. It's hard not to feel for her. All throughout the film, she is played around with like a ball by both sides of political power and for most of the time, she doesn't realize that. The small realizations she has of her tragedy throughout the film lead to unhinged bursts of anger and sadness. Because of this, we are led to empathize with her. We empathize with her because she is a passive entity in this game of power played between Lady Sarah and Abigail and she is completely ignorant of everything around her. For her, the world is just the palace she lives in. SHe has no knowledge of the misery outside her estate. She is protected by both Lady Sarah and Abigail from this reality so she can do what they want - Lady Sarah protects her by only letting her know the world through Sarah's opinion, and Abigail protects her by showering her with compliments and loveliness. If we think about it, Queen Anne is the only good person in the entire palace. Everyone else is just vultures flying over her as if she were a corpse. And that is why we understand and sympathize with her and why this contradiction is really not contradictory to the message of the film.

 One very interesting technical aspect I noticed in this film is the usage of low-angles. We always see the actors from a low-angle, as if we aren't worthy of looking at them as equals - after all, we, the spectators, are nothing more than mere commoners. But this possesses a certain irony. We see them as superiors, but they are shown in a very crude way. This is an incredibly clever way to critique power and those at the top of the social hierarchy. Yes, they are above us, but we see them - we see who they really are.

 And this is one of the most important aspects of The Favourite and Yorgos Lanthimos' directing. Everything is distorted and subverted. What could be used to praise the status of someone is actually doing the exact opposite. Looking ar someone from below is not considering them as superior to us but, in an ironic way, showing them as flawed as anyone else and, therefore, at the same level as us, showing that the social hierarchies are nothing more than social constructs and not justifiable through any biological characteristic. We see beautiful 18t century rooms and see a bizarre duck race with people yelling with grotesque expressions in it. We see men with beautiful garments throwing oranges at a naked man. Even the image itself is not safe from distortion, with the "fish-eye" technique being used in numerous scenes to emphasize this distorted world that these people lived in.

 Lastly, I would like to talk about the final shot - one of the most impressive and unforgettable of the year. After Abigail has finally beaten Lady Sarah and has gained her place at the side of the Queen seemingly with no competition, we see her in the Queen's room reading a book while the Queen sleeps. One of the Queen's rabbits hops under Abigail's leg, she notices it and steps on it. The squeals of pain wake the Queen up and she notices what Abigail is doing. She gets up and falls, as she is unable to appropriately stand up due to her gout. Abigail hears the scuffle and goes to help the Queen, who yells at her and orders her to massage her leg. What we see at this moment is an incredible work of editing that deserves to be applauded on its own where we see the superimposition of  Abigail's head, the Queen's head, and her rabbits. At this moment both Abigail and the Queen have realizations. Abigail realizes that she will never be safe and will always have to fight to keep her position, because no one is ever safe in power, even with no apparent competition. She will have to continue to fight for her survival even though she has already gotten what she wanted. And the Queen realizes her position as a source of power and that people have been using her. By having this realization, there's a hint that she may finally start using that to her advantage. And the rabbits that we see, what do they represent? In my opinion, they represent the eternal struggle for power. They are the continuing fight for power and the people struggling in this corrupt and rotten world for as long as humanity exists - people are like rabbits, fighting among each other for their own small morsel of cake. This final shot is so complex and full of subtext that it's impossible not to be unsettled by it. It's both satisfying and fatalistic. It shows the Queen finally taking the upper hand in her relationship, but it also shows the fight for power and the corruption inherent in it as inescapable and unending. It's almost claustrophobic. I personally had my heart racing with panic when watching this with how powerful it is. The world of editing, the soundtrack, the acting, the directing - everything culminates in this one final shot, which is one of the most perfect of the year.

 The Favourite is both comical and ironic and fatalistic and tragic. It's certainly one of Yorgos Lanthimos' finest works, and the extremely intelligent screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara deserves to be praised to pieces. Lanthimos makes this Period Piece extremely unique and modern, showing a completely different vision of both the genre and power. Through his direction, we realize that the reality of power is a distorted one. The world where the powerful live is not like our own. It's a world molded by a constant struggle, by a hunger - a hunger for more power - and the will to rise and step on everything else. It's a world where one can become a god or become absolute nothing. It's a very attractive world on the outside but, as Yorgos Lanthimos reveals to us. once we take a bite into it we see the putrid rotten meat lying under its beautiful golden skin.