j* Movie Reviews 2019

The Favourite (2018)

Great dresses, dry humour and I was quite c*ntstruck by the liberal use of the c-word.

Olivia Colman is the Queen, she's a queen of comedy, and in this she plays Queen Anne. Powerful, plump, maybe a bit dowdy, with 17 dead babies as many rabbits, and a bit of a thing for her right-hand women. This is a funny film about sex and power and it does a great job of transporting us back to the day (18th century) and letting us believe girls ran the world... which who know, maybe it was true. I don't claim to know history. And I love anachronism anyway... so there's that.

Gird your loins for a lot of heaving bosoms and otherwise raunchy scenes that are both shown and yet not graphic. There's a lot of bawdiness. They say cunt, and they say it more than in most other movies I see. It's basically the story of women using their womanly wiles to sleep their way to the top. With a dash of "political men, does anything ever change?" But it's super funny... in a particularly dry sort of way. Although by most reports we were the laughiest group in the cinema.

Special note here is the cinematography. Wish more fish-eye than a fish-eye soup, this manages a super excellent vision of the grandiose antique mansion setting. It's also super active camera-work, definitely not falling into the static trap of sitting the camera on a tripod. And we have people zipping back and forth constantly, dodging persimmons, shooting pigeons, dancing, galavanting, riding horses... for this kind of story a lot of stuff happens. And the dresses are spectacular and they are really well filmed... which seems a strange thing to say, but they really seem to make and effort to spin around the dresses so you see their true 3D form.

A few people told me it was darker, or a blacker comedy than they were expecting. So I spent the whole movie waiting for it to get black... but found it only ever went shades of grey. I know, I know, when I want black comedy, I want proper ebony. Like jet. Midnight black. When you're inside a cave and they turn the lights off and you know you're under a mountain and you can't see a thing and you don't know the way out and the mountain could fall down ... and you could die at any minute so you laugh.

So I think this leans more into "blue comedy" than black comedy... that is it's bawdy, it's ribald, it's fairly racey. But I personally didn't find it super dark.

It's a great film though!

J* gives it 4 stars.