Tag: Rachel Weisz

The Favourite

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The maverick Greek director of Dogtooth (2009) makes his third English language film and his first period costume drama. The Favourite is loosely based on early 18th century historical record. Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts who was beset by health issues, had some 17 pregnancies including many miscarriages and no heir surviving beyond the age of 11.

Her smart and shrewd childhood companion and friend Lady Sarah Churchill did much of Anne’s thinking for her, pushing her to support the merchant class political party the Whigs rather than the landed gentry party the Tories. The Whigs demanded support for a war against the French, while the Tories were resistant to the heavily increased taxes which funded the war effort at their expense. The relationship of Lady Sarah to the Queen was undermined by the arrival of maidservant Abigail Hill, a ruthless member of the gentry whose family had fallen on hard times and who was determined to fight her way back up the social ladder at any cost.

If that outline is true to the facts, the screenplay fashioned upon their foundation by Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara seek to explore less the historic detail of what actually happened and more the power dynamics of the three women involved. Olivia Colman is magnificent as the shy and vulnerable Anne who nevertheless wields absolute power as monarch. Rachel Weisz makes a fearsome Lady Sarah, whether the powerful manipulator seen at the start or the hideously disfigured victim of a riding accident she becomes towards the end as events turn against her. Emma Stone as the social climber Abigail however seems to be playing the same empowered woman character she always plays.

There’s a strong if historically contentious sexual element, with Lady Sarah the Queen’s clandestine lover until Abigail, who initially ingratiates herself with both Anne and Sarah by using a herbal paste to relieve burning sensations in the bedridden Anne’s legs, replaces Sarah in Anne’s affections. Further intrigues involve the English two party Parliament in the story’s background. Foppish opposition Tory leader Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult, the memorable psychotic from George Miller’s 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road almost unrecognisable under a lengthy, light coloured wig) senses Abigail working her way into the Queen’s favour and wants to recruit her to spy on Lady Sarah and Anne. Although a fringe character, he is more pivotal to the action than his rival the government’s Whig PM Lord Godolphin (James Smith) who the Queen, under Sarah’s influence, supports.

Apart from Stone’s arrival where she’s literally pushed out of the carriage into the shit on the ground, her excursions into the forest to collect ingredients for a herbal paste to ease a painful condition on her arm and scenes of Lady Sarah outside shooting and riding, the proceedings play out within the confines of Anne’s vast palace – kitchens staffed with cooks and maids, lengthy corridors with footmen, the Queen’s vast bedchamber which is also a well-stocked library.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan frequently shoots from bravura angles although his slavish use of Kubrickian reverse tracking shots is less than original and while the overall look and feel of the piece echoes Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975), it lacks that film’s rigorous discipline and doesn’t similarly immerse the viewer in its eighteenth century world.

Lanthimos still hasn’t bettered his earlier, homegrown Greek films like Kinetta (2005) and Dogtooth (2009) both of which not only present strange and unfamiliar worlds to the viewer but also completely immerse him/her in them. Those promised a maverick artist on a par with the likes of Lynch and Cronenberg, on which promise his bigger budget, English language movies (The Lobster, 2015, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, 2017) haven’t to date delivered. As with those films, while there’s much to admire in The Favourite, it still fails to achieve those qualities of Lanthimos’ early films that marked him out as destined for greatness.

The Favourite is out in the UK from Saturday, December 29th. Watch the film trailer below:

Disobedience

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Highly respected rabbi Rav Krushna (Anton Lesser) addresses his synagogue about the qualities that make mankind different from the animals and the angels. Man, he says, has free will. Alone in creation, he is able to disobey his creator. Then, as if struck down for preaching some treatise in defence of apostasy, he collapses.

Ronit Krushka (Rachel Weisz) is a British portrait photographer working in New York. She is promiscuous, rootless and seems to be looking for something although she’s no idea what. One day she gets a phone call which makes her return to London and the Hendon orthodox Jewish community which she left years ago. She heads straight for the house of Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), at once her father’s favourite pupil (and likely successor as Rav) and an old childhood friend. She’s a little surprised to find he and her other great childhood friend Esti (Rachel McAdams) are now man and wife. The couple agree to put Ronit up during her stay.

Two things become clear as the narrative plays out. One, Dovid’s relationship with the Rav is the father/child relationship that Ronit never had with her father. Dovid spent hours discussing Jewish religious texts with him while Ronit wasn’t really interested. But now she’s back, she wants proof that her father really did love her. Scant evidence is forthcoming on that front. Two, Ronit and Esti were in love back in the day. Ronit chose freedom from the religious community and got out; Esti married a husband as the community expected and made herself fit in. However although Dovid is a good man who cares deeply for Esti, there’s a certain spark missing in the relationship. A spark which threatens to ignite when Ronit returns.

There is much to admire here – tortured performances which plumb the depths of the soul from its two female leads, a feeling that the Orthodox Jewish background has been researched and put on the screen at a very deep level, unresolved issues with a departed father. It’s a world unfamiliar to the movies and to most cinemagoers, but the film plunges you right in. Director Sebastián Lelio and cameraman Danny Cohen seem completely in sync in their dealings with the cast, ensuring that those amazing things that actors do end up on the screen without the mechanics of film making getting in the way.

The theological and human contradiction of the Rav’s opening and final address underpin everything that follows. What is obedience? What is transgression? What’s more important – the community or the individual? As the two women struggle with their feelings for each other and events take their predictable course, you can almost feel the boxes of a contemporary Western individualist view being ticked off. Almost. The piece seems to be at its strongest where its characters struggle with these tensions.

Weisz is one of the instigating producers behind the project and has chosen well both in source material and director. It’s a surprisingly effective and cinematic movie adapted from a novel, a process which all too often produces the exact opposite outcome. Leilo having proved himself highly adept at stories involving women’s issues such in Gloria/2013 and transgressive sexuality in A Fantastic Woman (2017) here delivers a compelling story in a completely convincing, parochial North London environment. The result could so easily have been a tedious plod, but somehow, it all comes together. An impressive achievement.

Disobedience is in cinemas from Friday, November 30th (2017). On BritBox on Wednesday, March 17th (2021). On Mubi on Sunday, June 5th.