At its core, The Favourite<\/i> feels modern. The cold ambition and greed are relatable in our time. Sofia Coppola\u2019s <\/span>Marie Antoinette<\/i><\/span><\/strong> (2006) focuses on a different aspect of royalty, but it feels accessible in the same way. Coppola<\/span><\/a> took one of history\u2019s most absurd queens (played by Kirsten Dunst) and made her seem like a real, flawed human while also making fun of the actions that led to her downfall. Marie Antoinette<\/i> was the royal drama that paved the way for Favourite<\/i> director Yorgos Lanthimos dark comedy of manners.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There are a lot of rituals, items of clothing, and ways of thinking in history that just don\u2019t make sense now. In many period dramas, the audience is expected to suspend their disbelief and just go with it. Coppola doesn\u2019t do that, which paved the way for <\/span>Lanthimos<\/span> to ignore this genre trope as well. Both directors lean into the absurdity and sometimes even the grotesqueness of old royalty. In Marie Antoinette<\/i>, Coppola emphasizes how ridiculous the rituals were at Versailles. During Antoinette\u2019s first morning in France, she stands naked and shivering, waiting to be dressed by the highest ranking woman in the room. Unfortunately, high-ranking women can stroll in and interrupt the routine. If that wasn\u2019t enough, her sister-in-law takes a long time to pull off her gloves. \u201cThis is ridiculous!\u201d Antoinette says.<\/span><\/p>\n Lanthimos doesn\u2019t focus on the routines of the monarchy as much, though there is a great scene showing courtiers throwing fruit at a naked man, which brings to mind some of Marie Antoinette\u2019s hard-partying friends. Versailles was notorious for insane rules as King Louis IV thought protocols would keep the gentry distracted. The most ridiculous figure in The Favourite<\/i> is Queen Anne. She\u2019s like a petulant child who needs to be simultaneously bossed around and soothed. \u201cDid you just look at me? Did you?\u201d Anne bellows at a poor servant boy. \u201cLook at me. Look at me! How dare you?!\u201d Anne seems unhinged, and that\u2019s why the people around her believe they can control her. The Favourite<\/i> shows how crazy it would be to have to move your entire life around someone else\u2019s mood. <\/span><\/p>\n Both movies treat their subject matter irreverently. Instead of orchestral music, Marie Antoinette<\/i> incorporates rock \u2019n\u2019 roll and modern pop hits into the soundtrack. Coppola very famously layered \u201cI Want Candy\u201d over one of Antoinette\u2019s shopping spree montages. The Favourite<\/i> uses dry one-liners and physical humor, as when Abigail (Emma Stone) is pushed unceremoniously into a ditch by Harley (Nicholas Hoult) after she refuses to give him inside information about Queen Anne\u2019s policy decisions. <\/span><\/p>\n But despite ridiculing Marie Antoinette, Coppola makes the argument that the audience should feel a little sorry for her. Antoinette was stripped of her Austrian identity as she stepped into France, and was alone in a place where the courtiers openly mocked her. After she became Queen, she retreated into her own palace, the Petit Trianon, because she felt safe there away from all the pomp and ceremony. In the last third of the movie, one of her children dies. Yes, she should not have spent an ungodly amount of money while her subjects were starving, but she was ultimately a silly girl who wasn\u2019t taught any better. When the mob is outside Versailles, Antoinette is quiet and tearful. She goes to the balcony to see the mob, and even lays her head down, like she would on a scaffold, which silences them. The Queen knows her fate. Coppola constructed a complex character when she could have just had Antoinette say, \u201cLet them eat cake!\u201d and cruelly laughed as she walked by dying peasants. Some critics didn\u2019t believe that the French queen should have gotten such a sympathetic portrayal. Antoinette was flawed and that wasn\u2019t something Coppola shied away from, which was something filmmakers still, unfortunately, struggle with when putting female characters onscreen.<\/span><\/p>\n Lanthimos takes a page out of Coppola\u2019s book. He makes all three of his female leads three-dimensional. He handles Queen Anne\u2019s backstory especially well. Queen Anne is clearly fragile. She\u2019s constantly bedridden due to her very painful gout and weak stomach. Her physical ailments occupy most of her time, and when she isn\u2019t dwelling on that, she\u2019s caring for her 17 rabbits. They just aren\u2019t any pets though. They\u2019re named after the 17 children<\/span><\/a> she lost to miscarriage, stillbirth, or illness. The tragedy of that is nearly unfathomable. The rabbits mean a lot to her, which is why it\u2019s so disturbing when Sarah doesn\u2019t respect them. The Favourite<\/i> doesn\u2019t shy away from uncomfortable and awful realities that these characters face, but that doesn\u2019t mean the three leads are good people. They\u2019re difficult to root for and very fun to watch.<\/span><\/p>\n The Favourite<\/i> took tropes and concepts that Marie Antoinette<\/i> introduced. Lanthimos elevated everything to insane levels and dug deeper into the characters than Coppola originally did. The Favourite<\/i> is probably going to be more successful during awards season than Marie Antoinette<\/i> was, but modern films about monarchies and history really owe a lot to the irreverent Marie Antoinette<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n In The Favourite, Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) stuffs a piece of cake into her face, then promptly vomits it back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":556,"featured_media":10847,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399,1400],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back","category-on-the-marquee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/marie-antoinette-wedding-dance.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/6b8af2a30bbd98d16bdb394f93ff0656.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nJoin our mailing list<\/a>! Follow us on Twitter<\/a>! Write<\/a>\u00a0for us!<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"