The Favorite

Yorgis Lanthimos' The  Favorite (2018) belongs to a genre of films that feminism has rendered obsolete:  dueling divas.  In pictures of this kind, two formidable women fight to the death over some prize that is not worthy of them.  (The prize may be a man or prestige or, in some cases, the two women's agon may simply be a matter of personal pride or perversity.)  Examples of this kind of melodrama include Dead Ringer (Bette Davis v. Bette Davis), All About Eve, the recent HBO film Feud about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, Robert Aldrich's 1962 film featuring Davis and Crawford made much in the mood of The Favorite -- both pictures involve a disabled protagonist and a dank palatial house. Lanthismos, who makes disquieting, casually surreal films, has updated this genre paradoxically by making it ancient -- in The Favorite, two ladies-in--waiting to the British Queen Anne literally mangle one another in their efforts to become the gouty and debilitated Queen's favorite.  The film is a costume drama that treats the past with post-modern seriousness -- the past is a foreign country to which different customs and moral standards apply.  Some critics have suggested that the film is anachronistic -- I think this is completely wrong.  There are several anachronistic elements:  at one point, someone accuses another of "paranoia", surely a word that didn't exist in the 17th century; in the another scene, the word "explicit" is used -- also, I think, a term that would not be current with John Milton or Alexander Pope.  A dance scene seems to borrow gestures and steps from the famous minuet between Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction -- dance always looks ridiculous, however, and, for all I know, the peculiar hand-gestures and hopping around shown in the film invokes real "figures' made by dancers in the period.  Otherwise, the movie seems scrupulously exact to the period with some surreal departures that owe less to anachronism and more to Lanthimos' taste for the grotesque.  The men wear elaborate wigs of the kind satirized by Hogarth and his contemporaries and their faces are elaborately tarted-up with bright rouge and white powder.  The palace is a maze of long dark corridors, sometimes shot through disorienting fish-eye lenses -- the image often is distorted around the edges or bends at the center.  At night, the world is appropriately dark -- here and there, the flicker of a candle shows part of a face or a trace of garment.  The fields around the palace are vast and vacant -- gloomy forests and miserable-little crossroads where there might be a tavern and a whorehouse.  There is something at stake between the warring divas -- Lady Marlborough, the Queen's favorite when the film begins, is waging a literal war in France.  (Her proxy is the general Lord Marlborough, her husband.)  The war is costly and will require a substantial tax levy likely to cause unrest in the kingdom.  Queen Anne is a cipher -- she can barely move due to gout that causes suppurating wounds on her legs and feat and eats gluttonously.  Her bedroom is full of rabbit cages -- she has suffered 17 miscarriages, still-births, or neo-natal deaths and she seems to have a bunny for ever child that she has lost.  Lady Marlborough manipulates the rather dull-witted Queen (whom she sometimes calls Mrs. Morley) by providing her with sex -- the film uses the euphemism "rub my legs" for sexual activity between the two women.  Abigail, the rival for the Queen's affections, is introduced into the palace as a scullery maid -- in fact, she is a high-born woman who's dissolute father sold her to "a corpulent German with a thin penis" to pay off the gambling debts that have ruined the family.  Abigail is determined to regain her status as nobility.  Initally mistreated by everyone -- her hands are burnt raw by lye that she is forced to use to scrub the floors -- Abigail is plucky, courageous, and ambitious.  (This is a world in which everyone beats everyone else up, servants are routinely whipped, and the only form of heterosexual sex seems to be rape.)  She uses a herbal remedy, initially devised to treat her lye-scalded hands, to palliate the Queen's gout.  Then, at the first opportunity, she "rubs the queen's legs", more enthusiastically than Lady Marlborough, it seems, and enters her favor.  The stage is set for the showdown between Lady Marlborough and Abigail, rivalry that provides the narrative for the last two-thirds of the movie.  The quarrel between the women escalates into combat that leaves Lady Marlborough not just scarred, but disfigured -- Abigail poisons her and she falls from her horse and is dragged for miles behind the animal before being rescued and, then, held hostage for several weeks in a squalid brothel.  Ultimately, the level of violence between the two women requires the queen to choose between them. 

Lanthimos in this film, and his prior The Lobster, equates sex with power and domination.  In this regard he is heir to Fassbinder and, in some respects, The Favorite is very similar to The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a melodrama about a lesbian relationship also involving dizzying reversals.  (And like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Favorite also relies upon an elaborate and baroque set, in the case of Lanthimos' film, the palace with its dark stairways and gothic chambers, a claustrophobic warren where the struggle between the women takes place.)  The Favorite manipulates audience expectations.  We begin the film identifying with poor, abused Abigail.  We admire her courage and her stubbornness.  (Spoilers here follow.)  But as the film progresses, she seems increasingly sadistic and, at last, after she has won, we observe her crushing underfoot the sick queen's rabbits just to hear them squeal.  By this stage, the old Queen looks moribund -- a stroke appears to have caused half of her face to droop and she speaks in a distorted, garbled whisper.  It's obvious that her power is illusory and, certainly, there is nothing remotely attractive about her --she's a big, shapeless, heavy-set woman who walks uncertainly with a crutch or must be pushed through her palace in a wheelchair.  Lady Marlborough, who we initially dislike, has a long history with poor Mrs. Morley and what we interpret, at first, as cruelty (she says the Queen looks like "an angry badger") turns out to be merely honesty.  In fact, at the climax of the film, we discover that Lady Marlborough actually loves the old Queen and is willing to sacrifice her advantage over Abigail out of this love.  The film's final shot, a peculiar and rare example of a triple exposure (the images are a close-up of Abigail masturbating the dowdy, half-comatose queen, the Queen's face, and a great proliferation of rabbits, symbolizing the Queen's infertility and losses) shows Abigail's triumph -- but a triumph to what effect:  she can now bully and terrorize the old Queen.  Of course, the Queen's face, to the extent we can read her expression, displays horror -- she now grasps that she has been delivered wholly into the possession of someone who hates her.  (The effect is similar to the ending of Fassbinder's 1974 Martha in which Helmut, the sadistic husband, ends with asserting total control over his paralyzed wife. )  The Favorite is compelling and very dark.  It lacks the ending that the audience desires -- that is, a final reversal of fortune punishing Abigail for her cruelty.  Accordingly, the film leaves its viewers with a faint sense of despair that is slightly unpleasant.  The movie's soundtrack is largely from the period:  Purcell and Dowland although there is a scary and minimalist sound-cue, a tick and, then, an electronic squawk that repeats over and over again in some of the more sinister scenes.  Abigail deteriorates into a cartoonish villainess -- on her honeymoon night, she masturbates her unfortunate husband while scheming against Lady Marlborough:  the masturbation theme is significant to the film but this sequence seems caricatured and, almost, too much.  There is a striking and bizarre scene in which a naked man, smeared with fruit juice, prances in front of a white screen also splotched with juice -- people are throwing fruit at him, apparently pomegranate.  (In the film's credits, we see that the man is a "Naked Pomegranate Tory" -- he is nude except for an elaborate wig.)  This kind of movie rises or falls on the quality of the embattled divas:  Emma Stone plays the icy Abigail, Rachel Weisz is Lady Marlborough, and Olivia Coleman has the part of the doomed, hysterical queen -- all of them are superb.