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, poisoning 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.
Once you have seen it
Track what Abigail is wearing in each new scene. (setting)
Stone moves from mud to scullery gray to fine dress to wife. Each costume is worn completely while it lasts. No layer underneath it is ever shown to you.
Payoff: You never catch a real self beneath the performance, because the film does not put one there. In the reading: le faussaire. The reading calls Abigail a forger: she does not hide a true self, she makes the next one and means it.
Count the candles at night and look at the corners. (light)
Ryan lit with banks of real candles and daylight through vast windows, on 35mm. Faces flicker warm and the edges of the frame fall to black. Kubrick's Barry Lyndon did this first.
Payoff: The light is beautiful and gives you very little to see with. People vanish at the edge of every room.
Look at the chapter cards and the lines they quote. (structure)
Mavropsaridis breaks the film into chapters titled with scraps of its own dialogue, often the crudest available. The cards keep announcing what kind of story you are in.
Payoff: The structure steps back from the drama at regular intervals, so you read the court instead of sinking into it.
Watch whose hand ends up on whose body. (staging)
The leg rubbed, the wound dressed, the hand kissed, the head pressed down. Every alliance in the film is settled by who may touch the Queen and who kneels to do it.
Payoff: Access to one woman's skin is the whole government. The touching is the statecraft, not a sign of it.
Carry this in: Watch the walls bend and watch who is small inside them. The rooms are doing the film's work.