The Favourite  ★★★★

THE period drama has been a staple of film almost since the medium’s origin.

Since around the 1970s approaches have regularly ranged from the conventional to the obscure.

The latest attempt, The Favourite, is perfectly pitched between the two.

While it looks like a traditional treatment, with incredible attention to detail in custuming and design and a familiar tale of royal intrigue, the characters, script and presentation hark back to the more daring approaches of Ken Russell’s Women In Love, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and even avant garde master Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract.

While I don’t believe The Favourite is ultimately in quite the same league, it skilfully presents a co-existence of high farce and cutting drama.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos follows up The Lobster and The Killing of a Scared Deer with his interpretation of Queen Anne’s reign over Britain for a short period of the early 18th Century.

Anne is an enigma – at times intelligent, wilful and forthright but at others spoiled, child-like and withdrawn, she is constantly prone to bouts of ill-health.

Her mental state is also fractured, caused in no small way to the fact she has been pregnant 17 times but has lost 12 children to miscarriage or still-birth and the others in their infancy.

When we meet the Queen she is suffering from gout and reliant on her right-hand woman, Lady Sarah, to keep the affairs of State running.

Lady Sarah sometimes lets the responsibility get ahead of her and this leads to occasional disputes with Queen Anne amid the political machinations of the time.

Enter a new servant, Abigail, who was previously a Lady herself but lost everything due to her husband’s failings. She returns determined to win favour in the Queen’s Court and return to her former stature.

If this means going head-to-head in a psychological war with Lady Sarah for Queen Anne’s affections then so be it.

The scene is set for a deliciously black drama with constant absurdist comedy keeping the narrative balanced and the audience constantly guessing how the story will unfold.

This makes for terrific scenes that can start with moments of laugh-out comedy but quickly transcend into equally dramatic exchanges.

It’s a wonderful script, initially written by Deborah Davis 20 years ago and finally co-written by Australian Tony McNamara who has worked previously on some of our most popular relationship-based television series, including The Secret Life of Us, Love My Way and Offspring.

It’s brought to life by a trio of great actresses – Olivia Colman as Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz as Lady Sarah and Emma Stone as Abigail – who again demonstrate their incredible range.

If your taste in period drama runs mostly to the conventional, The Favourite may not be to your taste – characters in ways that arent necesssarily of the time and there are many gaps in the historical narrative.

As the occasional fish-eye lenswork alludes to, this is a distorted view of history but it’s also a terrifically entertaining one.