Women on top | 3 January 2019

The Favourite is a period romp set during the reign of Queen Anne, but it’s not your average period romp. The women are in charge. There is hot lesbian sex. It is savagely funny and often preposterous, with duck racing and ludicrous, vertiginous wigs and an astonishingly weird dance scene. Yet it is also involving and deeply moving with performances that are monumentally stellar. It stars Olivia Colman and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz and while they are all flat-out fabulous, Olivia Colman, good grief. She deserves thousands of Oscars and thousands of Baftas, and if she can’t fit another through her door she’ll just have to bin some.

The film is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer), with a screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, and Colman plays Queen Anne, who ruled between 1702 and 1714, but seems to have always been overlooked. (In fact, she’s been so overlooked that I can’t even recall Lucy Worsley ever dressing up as her.) Yet this is based on fact, albeit embellished fact, and it’s incredibly fascinating. The Anne we meet is not in great shape. She is fat, reclusive, mercurially tempered, crippled by gout and those who care for her also have their own agendas. She’s like a late-stage Elvis, but with rabbits. She keeps 17 in her bedchamber, where most of the action takes place. Her closest confidante is Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz), who runs the country on the Queen’s behalf. The power shifts constantly in their relationship but Sarah knows how to please her, including in bed. However, trouble brews when Sarah’s cousin, Abigail Hill (Stone), arrives at the palace seeking employment, having fallen on hard times. (Her father lost her in a card game to a German with a small penis.