DI MATTIA The Favourite

Bedroom Games

SEX AND POWER IN THE FAVOURITE

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An earthy and caustic representation of historical events – real and rumoured – during the eighteenth-century reign of Queen Anne, Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy gleefully up-ends period-drama tropes in its depiction of the backroom machinations and sexual intrigues that play out between its female protagonists. While women are very much at the centre of the film, however, the limitations imposed by their male-dominated surroundings remain ever present, as JOANNA DI MATTIA contends.

Bedroom Games

SEX AND POWER IN THE FAVOURITE

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An earthy and caustic representation of historical events – real and rumoured – during the eighteenth-century reign of Queen Anne, Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy gleefully up-ends period-drama tropes in its depiction of the backroom machinations and sexual intrigues that play out between its female protagonists. While women are very much at the centre of the film, however, the limitations imposed by their male-dominated surroundings remain ever present, as JOANNA DI MATTIA contends.

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owards the conclusion of The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), Lady Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), remarks to her cousin, Abigail Masham, nee Hill (Emma Stone), ‘We were playing very different games.’

This remark is not entirely true. Sarah has fallen out of favour with Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), despite her long-time status as the British monarch’s closest confidant and political adviser. Meanwhile, Abigail has ascended from the scullery, securing a noble marriage to Colonel Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn) and £2000 a year on her way up. Sarah, who has

been close to Anne since they were girls, has lost her place as the queen’s ‘favourite’ to a woman unafraid to ‘act in a way that meets with the edges of [her] morality’. To make that point violently clear, Abigail has gone so far as to poison Sarah to try to get her out of the way.

Sarah and Abigail are enemies, but they are not so different.

Each has done what they deem necessary in order to survive the brutal manoeuvres of eighteenth-century court life. For Abigail, who has ‘fallen far’ (she arrives at the palace face-down in the mud), the stakes are especially high. Abigail comes from a merchant family whose fortune was lost because of her father’s

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) THIS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Anne; Sarah and Abigail (Emma Stone); Anne with members of parliament gambling; as she explains to Sarah, when she was fifteen, her father ‘lost’ her in a card game to an older man. Both Sarah and Abigail play games with each other, with Anne and with the men around them – not for fun, but because surviving as a woman in eighteenth-century England demands it.

The Favourite is a film about power – who has it, who wants it and what they are willing to do in order to hold on to it. It is a film that puts women first, focusing on the relationship between gender roles, sex and power dynamics. In The Favourite, power plays un-

psychological veracity. From its subtle, observant opening scene to its enigmatic, provocative finale, it is a film that destabilises what we expect to see and also how we imagine we will see it.

The Favourite depicts the triangular relationship between Queen Anne – the English monarch from 1702 until her death at the age of forty-nine in 1714 – and the two women vying to be her companion, her ‘favourite’. Lanthimos offers a complex version of the ‘strong female character’ trope by reminding us that these women, especially Anne and Abigail, are actually very vulnerable,

Lanthimos offers a complex version of the ‘strong female character’ trope by reminding us that these women, especially Anne and Abigail, are actually very vulnerable, and not able to be understood outside the Screen Education 95 I © ATOM

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context of their gender and the limitations imposed on it at this time in history. fold in the bedroom; who has the upper hand over Queen Anne is determined by who provides her with the greatest sexual pleasure and romantic adoration. Set in 1708, The Favourite is a Restorationera period film that’s singular in its tone and execution, disrupting conventions and shifting the focus from historical accuracy to

and not able to be understood outside the context of their gender and the limitations imposed on it at this time in history. Within this arrangement, neither Anne, nor Sarah, nor Abigail is rendered as one-dimensional; even in their most provocative moments, we are not watching caricatures of human behaviour.

But with The Favourite, Lanthimos, working from a sharp, acerbic screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, reorients audience expectations, following the lead of period films like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) and Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights (2011), which both bypass the conventions of the genre to enable a greater focus on their female characters’ internal lives.5 While Lanthimos includes Fiona Crombie’s sumptuous production design and Sandy Powell’s ostentatious costumes, he modernises the period film with sexual content and vulgar language. Anne, Sarah and Abigail predominantly behave in a way that could be defined as ‘unladylike’, their

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Lanthimos is no stranger to pushing the envelope as a filmmaker, whether telling stories in his native Greek or in English.1 He says of The Favourite, ‘I loved being given the chance to wonder, what liberties could really be taken?’2 In her review of the film, critic Molly Haskell describes ‘the charm in doing period’ as effectively balancing ‘a baseline fidelity to the past, its dress and rituals and habits of mind’ with ‘a modernizing touch that brings it into an immediate and startling kinship with our own time’.3 Audiences watch period and historical films anticipating certain visual and tonal features. Adaptations of Jane Austen or EM Forster novels, for example, set in the more restrictive Regency and Edwardian eras, are often defined as stuffy or ‘tasteful’. Such films deliver sumptuous sets, costumes and attractive protagonists who speak witty dialogue, and audiences are said to engage with their surface pleasures above all else.4 Historical dramas, like Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) and Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000), meanwhile, re-create great historical events (real or imagined), in which women are often sidelined or rendered completely invisible.

Period and historical films have trained audiences to anticipate specific narrative and visual elements around the performance of gender and sexuality. We expect to see women who are refined and modest; women who express little to no sexual desire; women who behave in a way deemed ‘appropriate’ for their sex. In these films, women are effectively corsetted into ‘good’ behaviour by their exterior accoutrements. In a film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie and Jane might express themselves intelligently and fervently, but it is unlikely they will ever be shown to take control of their own sexual satisfaction or use it to their advantage.

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Anne, Sarah and Abigail predominantly behave in a way that could be defined as ‘unladylike’, their bodies unruly, uncontrollable and untethered to what is expected of them – by either the society in which they live or the audience watching them on screen.

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bodies unruly, uncontrollable and untethered to what is expected of them – by either the society in which they live or the audience watching them on screen. ‘This mud stinks,’ Abigail declares when she arrives at the palace; she is covered in it, much as Lanthimos is absorbed with the filth and muck of the period. His ‘ladies’ use frank, often filthy language to describe what they want and how they plan to get it. Sarah’s joke that Abigail’s role at court could be as ‘a monster for the children to play with’ extends this disruptive tone. Neither woman is there to be nice. When men verbally attack Sarah and Abigail, they bite back; Sarah’s tongue, in particular, is always loaded with a venomous barb.

Lanthimos’ visual style adds to this disturbance. As Haskell describes, he ‘uses off-kilter camera angles and fish-eye lenses to further increase our sense of disorientation and unease’.6 The fisheye lens, in particular, provides a misshapen, circular frame that presents the palace as a hermetically sealed world, a literal fishbowl – a concept aurally reinforced by the soundtrack’s edgy, often jarring harpsichord. Lanthimos emphasises the grotesqueries of court life: bawdy and bizarre scenarios like duck and lobster races; characters moving around shadowy corridors, or lurking ghoulishly around corners ready to pounce. Here, no-one is safe from gossip or incursion. In Haskell’s words, the palace is ‘a kind of No Exit, with its own rules and rituals, most of them either disgusting or deadly’.7 Of course, The Favourite is not the first historical film to feature one or multiple female protagonists. But it differs from films like Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998) or Mary Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke, 2018), which centre on the role these monarchs played in monumental, near-mythical historical events – events associated with acts of national or individual triumph. The Favourite is uninterested in this terrain. It is, significantly, a history film without a hero or clearly delineated moral centre. Anne is not presented in a flattering way: she is a fragile woman living in a state of almostconstant physical and emotional agony, a woman who requires perpetual attention. Instead of witnessing the queen delivering rousing speeches, we see her total dependence on others – her limping body, her hysterical screaming, her political ignorance and incompetence.

Anne stubbornly eats to excess, exacerbating the agonies of her gout-ridden body.8 Colman’s masterful, Oscar-winning performance keeps her character balanced between comedy and angst. Anne is a woman of appetites: keen to live what life she has to the fullest. But she is mortal, and prone to the same foibles and disappointments as her subjects. We see her vulnerabilities on display at a palace ball, where she is confined to a wheelchair, unable to dance; Anne watches Sarah make a spectacle of herself with Masham, and later recoils from her in rage and jealousy.

She governs by her whims: angry with Sarah, the queen tells the leader of the opposition, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult), that she was wrong to double the land tax (which she had done on Sarah’s advice), and that she will instead sue for peace with France.

Jealousy, we see, is Anne’s primary motivator in matters of state.

The historical record of Anne’s reign is fixated on her body, frequently describing it as fat, sick and ineffectual.9 Anne’s body is central in The Favourite, too, but the film provides insight and complexity into the psychological experience of this overweight, diseased woman. In addition to poor physical health, it is likely Anne suffered from depression. Pregnant a total of seventeen times, she suffered multiple miscarriages and several stillbirths.

The few of her children who survived mostly died before the age of two; the longest surviving child, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, died not long after his eleventh birthday.10 Anne’s body and mind were unquestionably battered by these experiences,

Anne’s body is also a source of power – the locus of her sexual desire and a site that confers authority on others. As Lanthimos depicts it, this power is most frequently exchanged within the private space of Anne’s bedroom.

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even if the historical record, mired in masculine measures of success and failure, does not have the words to describe it.

Importantly, Anne’s body is also a source of power – the locus of her sexual desire and a site that confers authority on others.

As Lanthimos depicts it, this power is most frequently exchanged within the private space of Anne’s bedroom, where the personal and political collide. It is here, under the cover of darkness, that Sarah is able to further her husband’s political cause by keeping Anne in thrall to her sexually. It is in this way that Abigail advances at court by discovering Sarah’s secret means of control – significantly, at the same time as the audience does – and follows suit. When Anne tells Sarah of her rival that ‘I like it when she puts her tongue inside me’, she is revealing not only the specific contours of her sexual appetites, but also just what it takes to win the title of ‘favourite’.

The predominance of Anne’s bedroom in much of The Favourite links power and sex, but it is also a subversive move

by Lanthimos, shifting the popularly accepted idea of history as something that happens in public spaces to something that unfolds in private ones. If so-called accuracy in filmmaking about historical figures is a matter of adhering to the historical record – of sticking closely to the facts of government, of wars, of the so-called ‘great’ events of history – then that is overwhelmingly a history of men, and a history that writes women out.

The Favourite takes the opposite tack. It does away with any reference to Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark.

It removes the seven children that Sarah and her husband, Lord Marlborough (Mark Gatiss), had from the version of history it depicts. A war is being waged with France, but we don’t see any battles. Men populate parliament, but appear as foppish,

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preening tyrants: not entirely irrelevant to the film’s action, but certainly figures of mockery.

In The Favourite, history narrows down to what these three women are doing with one another, and explores the social and psychological reasons why. The film begins and ends in Anne’s bedroom because, in a bedroom, women are uncorsetted – literally and symbolically undressed, and unfastened from societal expectations. In the opening scene, we see a long shot of Anne being undressed as Sarah looks on. Anne’s crown is removed, and a close-up reveals a tired, sad looking woman who asks her closest friend about the speech she has just given, ‘Did I lisp?’ In this intimate space, Anne can reveal her frailties and, with them, her authentic self.

If women are relegated by much of history to domestic spaces, there is power in redirecting the focus of a historical film into these. Screenwriters Davis and McNamara can only ever speculate about the way people spoke in the eighteenth century, and can’t possibly know the intimate details of Anne’s b ­ edchamber.11 But they understand that the only way to tell the story of a monarch who was sick and immobile is to focus on the intimate relationships she had with those people who moved in and out of her chambers.12 Anne’s, Sarah’s and Abigail’s motivations reveal themselves to us through their movements, moods, griefs and desires. In a telling moment, Sarah remarks that too much kindness can lead to stupidity. While we see her dutifully and generously attend to Anne’s every need – friends since childhood, they affectionately refer to each other as ‘Mrs Morley’ and ‘Mrs Freeman’ – her actions vacillate between wanting to soothe Anne’s misery and making it worse, all the better to keep the queen a supplicant to Sarah’s own needs.

It is Abigail whom we are most encouraged to identify with.

She is the audience’s point of reference inside the palace. Her trajectory, from scullery maid to keeper of the privy purse, has the most overtly intrepid arc. Abigail makes her way into Anne’s private chambers by providing a herbal balm that soothes the inflamed sores on the queen’s legs; she secures her place there by providing Anne with sexual pleasure superior to that offered by Sarah. Unlike Sarah, who tells the queen that ‘love has limits’, she is friendly towards Anne’s ‘little ones’, the seventeen rabbits she keeps as replacements for the seventeen babies she has lost. But even Abigail is more antihero than hero; she regularly flatters and lies to Anne as she inveigles herself more deeply into the queen’s intimate life. Hers is a character whose moral compass spins most decisively somewhere between good and bad. ‘I think you are a pretty little liar that I have misjudged,’ Sarah tells Abigail, after she finds her in bed with Anne.

Lanthimos complicates our response to Abigail’s manipulations by making it clear how much of her story is about escaping threats of violence – sexual and otherwise – from men. We see it in her first scene; cramped within a carriage making its way to the palace, she sits opposite a man who smiles and then masturbates in front of her. This becomes a precursor for the kinds of exchanges that Abigail will have with men once she arrives at court. She flirts with Masham, but derives no real pleasure from him even after they are married. Harley, who does not have unimpeded access to the private space of Anne’s room, repeatedly threatens Abigail with physical violence to get her to spy on Sarah and Anne and report back to him with information that might be advantageous to his political cause. When Masham enters her room at night, Abigail expects he is there to rape, not seduce, her. Because of her father’s misfortunes, Abigail has learned early in life that she has to play a certain part to navigate this world; she understands she needs to take control of her economic situation, and her body, in order to survive. ‘I’m not quite following,’ Masham says as Abigail details her plans to ascend, encapsulating the very real gap between how women and men must negotiate court life.

The Favourite is a black comedy that ends as a tragedy. Even while placing women at the front of this version of history, Lanthimos understands that eighteenth-century England is, after all, a man’s world. The men might be sidelined in The Favourite – Sarah’s husband is an almost completely absent figure; Anne’s husband is never seen or spoken of – but they are not entirely irrelevant to the action that plays out here. It is men who control and determine the system in which the women express their ambitions. Abigail’s story, in particular, makes clear the ways in which men create and maintain a system of power designed to benefit their own needs.

Anne’s bedroom provides a safe space of sorts. But, as a space in which women tussle for what little power society affords them, it is not without its own perils. Abigail’s declaration after her marriage – ‘It’s over now. I have won. I am safe’ – is a false hope. Like Sarah before her, she is caught in Anne’s whims, the upper hand shifting back and forth, in constant need of reinforcing. With its puzzle-like final sequence, in which Abigail’s and Anne’s faces are shown in superimposition together with the queen’s horde of rabbits, The Favourite suggests that the two women are locked together in increasing dependence and misery – the bedroom truly a battlefield, with the battle far from over.

Joanna Di Mattia has a PhD in women’s studies from Monash ­University.

She is an award-winning film critic living in Melbourne. SE

The Favourite is Lanthimos’ third consecutive film made in English and featuring an international cast after The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017).

2 Yorgos Lanthimos, quoted in Ian Freer, ‘Five Reasons to Watch The Favourite’, The Telegraph, 20 December 2018, <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/the-favourite/reasons -to-watch/>, accessed 20 June 2019.

3 Molly Haskell, ‘Review: The Favourite’, Film Comment, November–December 2018, <https://www.filmcomment.com/ article/review-the-favourite/>, accessed 20 June 2019.

4 See, for instance, Andrew Higson, ‘English Heritage, English Literature, English Cinema: Selling Jane Austen to Movie Audiences in the 1990s’, in Eckart Voigts-Virchow (ed.), Janespotting and Beyond: British Heritage Revisions Since the Mid-1990s, Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, 2004, pp. 35–50.

5 As Guardian columnist Ellen E Jones explains, The Favourite takes its place among these films and other recent period dramas with their ‘direct expression of characters’ thoughts and feelings’; see Jones, ‘Bed-hopping and Bunnies: The Favourite and the Radical Remake of the Period Drama’, The Guardian, 2 February 2019, <https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2019/feb/02/bed-hopping-and-bunnies-the-favourite -and-the-radical-remake-of-the-period-dramab>, accessed 20 June 2019.

6 Haskell, op. cit.

7 ibid., emphasis added; Haskell here seems to be referring to the 1944 Jean-Paul Sartre play, in which three characters are stuck in a single room together for eternity.

8 Biographer Ophelia Field explains that Queen Anne’s health was likely a more complicated matter than the medical profession of her time could possibly grasp: ‘Modern medics 1

now suspect her to have been suffering from a type of lupus (erythematosus), which can cause chronic arthritis, repeated miscarriages, red skin rashes, and joint pain in hands and legs. This probable lupus was compounded by obesity in later life.’ See Field, ‘Is The Favourite Historically Accurate in Its Depiction of Queen Anne’s Lesbianism?’ New Statesman, 2 January 2019, <https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/ film/2019/01/favourite-historically-accurate-its-depiction -queen-anne-s-lesbianism >, accessed 21 June 2019.

9 Anna Leszkiewicz reports that the Whig politician John Clerk declared of Queen Anne, ‘Nature seems to be inverted, when a poor infirm woman becomes one of the rulers of the world.’

See Leszkiewicz, ‘“Ugly, Gouty, Fat”: The Problem of Queen Anne’s Body’, New Statesman, 18 January 2019, <https://www. newstatesman.com/2019/01/queen-anne-body-the-favourite -olivia-colman >, accessed 24 June 2019.

10 ibid.

11 Love letters between Anne and Sarah – which we see Sarah threaten to use against the queen in The Favourite, and eventually burn – are widely reported to have in fact existed, alongside contemporaneous rumours about Anne having sexual relationships with Sarah and Abigail. Rumours of Anne and Sarah’s relationship may have been started by their political foes, while rumours of Anne and Abigail’s relationship were likely started by an out-of-favour Sarah.

See Field, op. cit.; and Nate Jones, ‘Everything You Need to Know About the 18th-century World of The Favourite’, Vulture, 27 November 2018, <https://www.vulture. com/2018/11/the-favourite-historical-accuracy.html>, accessed 24 June 2019.

12 The focus on Anne’s bedroom also tells us something specific about sex and desire, and specifically about desire between women: that it is often hidden, at most leaving near-imperceptible traces on the historical record.

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