Yorgos Lanthimos refused to tell the audience which woman to protect. His camera could not quite manage the same refusal.
To Her Most Gracious Majesty Anne, by the Grace of God, Queen of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith:
Your most humble and obedient servant begs leave to lay before Your Majesty her most sincere and devoted attachment, and to entreat that the warmth of feeling she bears toward Your Majesty’s person and comfort may be permitted to continue in such capacity as Your Majesty sees fit to bestow. Your servant asks nothing beyond the honour of proximity, and trusts that her dedication, being entire and unconditional, will recommend itself to Your Majesty’s favour above those whose attachment, however forcefully expressed, is of more recent date and perhaps less certain foundation.
Your Majesty’s most faithful, most devoted, most obedient servant.
This petition was written by one of three women. The film never tells you which. That is the argument.
| Director | Yorgos Lanthimos |
|---|---|
| Year | 2018 |
| Runtime | 119 minutes |
| Cast | Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone |
| Award | Grand Jury Prize, Venice 2018; Academy Award for Best Actress (Colman) |
| Streaming | Disney+, Apple TV (rental) |
Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite (2018) is set in the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) in the early eighteenth century, during the War of the Spanish Succession, when England’s foreign policy was being argued between the Marlboroughs and the Tories and the court’s internal politics were being conducted through rather more intimate channels. Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), has been the Queen’s closest companion and the effective power behind her decisions for years. When Sarah’s younger cousin Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) arrives destitute and begging for work, the household’s equilibrium begins to shift — and Abigail, with the patience and precision of someone who understands exactly what she has and exactly what she needs, works her way from scullery maid to Lady of the Bedchamber. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice in 2018, and Olivia Colman won the Academy Award for Best Actress. It arrived — as the previous review on this blog argued — as the correction All About Eve needed: the same architecture of female ambition and displacement, but with full interiority given to all three women, the predator role assigned to none. That was accurate. What it was not, quite, was the whole picture.
The All About Eve review argued that The Favourite “holds all of this without deciding which woman the audience should be protecting.” This is true of the screenplay. Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara’s script is meticulously even-handed: Sarah is ruthless and loyal simultaneously, Abigail is calculating and genuinely suffering simultaneously, Anne is helpless and sovereign simultaneously. No single perspective organises the moral field. But a film is not only its screenplay. A film is also its camera, its lenses, its spatial grammar — and Lanthimos made The Favourite with a fisheye lens that is almost always present, that bends the edges of every frame into a subtle curve, that compresses the peripheral and clarifies the central. The fisheye lens is usually described as the film’s aesthetic signature, its period irony, its way of making the baroque strangeness of court life visible. What it is also doing — quietly, consistently, in every shot — is making proximity to centre the governing principle of the image. Whoever occupies the centre of the frame is in sharp focus, undistorted, visually privileged. Whoever occupies the edges is bent, compressed, made slightly unreal. In a film that refuses to assign predator and prey, the camera nevertheless assigns a geometry. And the geometry is the grammar of the court itself: hierarchy expressed through distance from power, clarity earned by proximity to the sovereign, distortion the visual fate of everyone at the margins.
Watch where Abigail enters the frame when she first gains the Queen’s private attention. Watch where Sarah stands when she begins to lose it. The fisheye lens does not treat the displacement neutrally. It records it in the language of the very system Lanthimos’s screenplay refuses to endorse — the court’s own visual logic, in which closeness to the centre is clarity and distance is distortion — and the film never submits this language for examination. It believes it has made a film whose formal grammar is as democratically undecided as its screenplay. It has made a film whose formal grammar is the court, running beneath the screenplay’s refusals, saying something the screenplay cannot quite prevent it from saying: there are positions, there is a centre, and the question of who occupies it determines what is real.
The screenplay refuses to decide which woman the audience should protect. The camera cannot quite manage the same refusal. It speaks the court’s language even when the dialogue is arguing against it.
The film’s most honest confession is Queen Anne, and the thing it confesses is the one the All About Eve review could see only in outline from the outside. Anne is the only character in the film who experiences feelings she did not choose and cannot deploy. Sarah chose her loyalty and wielded it. Abigail chose her tenderness and applied it with precision. Anne’s feelings chose her. She loves Sarah with a totality that precedes strategy. She responds to Abigail with a need that outpaces calculation. Her grief for the seventeen rabbits — one for each child she carried and lost — is so completely undefended that it sits in the film like an open wound in a room full of people who have sealed theirs. The rabbits are not a quirk. They are the film’s only moment of completely ungoverned feeling, and Lanthimos photographs them with the same fisheye lens that photographs everything else, which means they too are subject to the court’s distorting geometry, which means even grief, in this world, is a spatial condition.
What the film cannot see — what it gives and simultaneously withholds — is that Anne’s ungovernable need is the mechanism that makes every other calculation possible. Sarah’s power exists because Anne needed someone who did not require managing. Abigail’s ascent is possible because Anne’s need migrated when its original object became difficult. Every strategic move in the film is made inside the space that Anne’s unstrategic feelings create. She is the film’s most fully realised character and its most thoroughly instrumentalised one. The interiority Lanthimos gives her is genuine and extraordinary — Olivia Colman finds registers of Anne’s grief and desire and petulance that exist nowhere in the screenplay as written, purely in the body, in the face, in the way the voice breaks on words it did not intend to break on. And that interiority is also the film’s engine. The full, ungovernable, unreasonable person at the centre of the court is the condition that makes the court’s politics possible. Lanthimos loves Anne clearly and uses her completely, and does not quite acknowledge that these are the same gesture.
Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) sets the same architecture — social climber, 18th-century court milieu, ambition navigated through proximity to power — at the opposite formal extreme, and the friction it generates against The Favourite is the most useful comparison the film has. Kubrick’s camera is the polar opposite of Lanthimos’s fisheye: the slowest possible zoom, the longest possible lens, the maximum possible distance between the camera and its subject. Where Lanthimos bends the world around his centre, Kubrick recedes from his. Barry Lyndon is watched from so far away, in frames so formally composed they resemble paintings from which all heat has been removed, that the audience never inhabits him, never shares his hunger, never loses themselves in the pleasure of his proximity to power. Kubrick refuses what Lanthimos attempts: not the moral hierarchy, but the warmth. The Favourite is a film you can live inside. Barry Lyndon is a film you can only observe. Both are about ambition in courts. One makes the court intimate. The other makes it glacial. What the comparison reveals is that Lanthimos’s fisheye warmth — the way it pulls you into the room, bends the world around these three women, makes the court feel alive with feeling rather than cold with protocol — is precisely what makes the film’s formal argument about hierarchy invisible. The warmth is the cover. The geometry is underneath it, running the court regardless.
Placed beside All About Eve, the progress across these two films is real and the limitation is real in equal measure. Mankiewicz gave Margo Channing everything and Eve Harrington nothing. Lanthimos gave all three women everything and used the woman at the centre as the engine for everyone else’s story. In both films, the character who most completely cannot strategise is the most used. Norma Desmond’s delusion is Joe Gillis’s subsidy. Anne’s need is Sarah’s power and Abigail’s ladder. The films are separated by sixty-eight years and a complete inversion of formal method, and they arrive at the same structural position through entirely different routes: the woman who feels without calculation is the condition that makes everyone else’s calculation possible, and neither film quite looks at what that costs her.
The last image of The Favourite is Anne on the floor, Abigail pressing on her leg, and the rabbits superimposed in triple exposure over Anne’s face — the children, the grief, the seventeen small mammals who received the love that had nowhere else to go. Abigail is pressing and pressing and the pressure is practical and Anne’s face does not change and the rabbits multiply across it and the fisheye lens holds the composition in its distorting circle and the film ends. It is one of the great final images in recent cinema. It is also a composition in which Anne is being used and observed simultaneously — Abigail pressing, the camera watching, the rabbits ghosted over her face like a caption — and the film offers no position from which to witness this that is not also complicit with the court’s geometry. The petition at the beginning of this review was written by one of three women. By the final image, it barely matters which. All three were always petitioning. The only one who never learned to petition was Anne, and she is on the floor, and the rabbits are crossing her face, and the film ends with the most honest thing it has to say: the court continues. The feeling does not.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950): our review is on this blog — the film The Favourite corrects and extends; where Mankiewicz gave interiority to the woman defending a position and nothing to the woman reaching for one, Lanthimos gives interiority to all three, and the comparison shows exactly what changes and exactly what, despite everything, stays the same.
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975): the same century, the same social climbing through proximity to power, but Kubrick’s camera recedes where Lanthimos’s bends inward — maximum distance versus maximum distortion — and the formal opposition shows what the fisheye lens’s warmth is quietly covering: the same court geometry, running underneath, indifferent to who is at the centre.
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