Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Favourite
2018 · Yorgos Lanthimos · The Favourite on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the walls at the edges of the frame. (camera)
Robbie Ryan shoots on extreme wide and fish-eye lenses. Paneling bows outward, corridors stretch, and a figure at the far end of a gallery shrinks to almost nothing.
Payoff: The grandeur curves into a container. There is no straight wall in this palace and no visible way out. In the reading: the saturated crystal. The reading calls the palace a saturated crystal: a sealed world with no outside, closing on whoever is inside it.
Notice how often a woman is framed inside a doorway. (staging)
Lanthimos places figures deep in long rooms, walled by portraits and paneling, and shoots them through doors and corridors. Hatfield House does the caging. The architecture is never only background.
Payoff: Rank is legible in space. You see who is allowed near the center of a room and who waits at its edge.
Look closely at the fabrics: denim, laser-cut patterns, stark black. (setting)
Sandy Powell keeps a tight palette and builds period silhouettes out of materials the period never had. At a glance the clothes read as history. Held longer, they read as theater.
Payoff: The costumes tell you this is not reconstruction. The past here is a stage the film built on purpose.
Listen for baroque music arriving over something cruel. (sound)
There is no original score. Handel, Bach, Vivaldi and Purcell are compiled against harsh modern pieces, and the grandest music tends to land on vomiting and humiliation.
Payoff: The selection is the comment. Period splendor is being used against the scene it accompanies.
Watch Colman's body: the leg, the appetite, the sudden rages. (performance)
Anne eats until she is sick, screams for what she wants, weeps over her rabbits, then turns imperial in one breath. Colman plays every register straight and never for camp.
Payoff: The most ruined body in the building holds absolute power, so everyone's politics has to run through her wants. In the reading: originary-world. The reading calls the court a thin surface over an originary world where only raw drives move: hunger, sickness, the need to be loved.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the walls bend and watch who is small inside them. The rooms are doing the film's work.