men trying to manipulate the queen by also maneuvering through Abigail and Sarah.

those that “loved” her did not know how to handle her. 

returns to her ladylike frocks when she returns to beg Anne for forgiveness;

The trousers put her in the power position as she occupies the domain of men

Women’s weapons are most effective.

Sarah and Abigail also use their frequent pigeon shooting outings in the same way men often do: to size each other up and display dominance.

uses sex as a tool of manipulation in the same ways we now consider inappropriate

While her gout leaves her in pain for much of the film, she spends the rest of the time whining, complaining, and indulging her most fanciful whims, including a repulsive scene in which she gorges herself on an elaborate cake, throws it up into a bucket then returns to bingeing in earnest

Abigail must do whatever is necessary to ensure that she will no longer be subjected to the whims of lesser men.

Anne’s position as the head of state allows her unprecedented reach and control, despite the film’s depiction of her as both a dilettante and a dolt.

Back in those days it wasn’t such a big thing, either. It wasn’t talked about so much as now. It just happened. I don’t think they paid so much attention to it.”

Lanthimos says that the matter of the Queen’s same-sex affairs isn’t teated as scandalous, but simply part of the story.

no films ever made with three women leads

“Provocative… I used to be defensive about it, but in the end I realised it’s exactly right. It’s what we’re trying to do – to provoke thought and discussion and, you know, shake people up to start thinking about things in a different way. I’m interested in messing with what they think is the norm.”

To this day, he avoids artificial lighting and doesn’t use makeup – unless, as in The Favourite, the actors are playing characters who are themselves manifestly slathered in powder and rouge.

“to infuse the scenes and actors with an unpredictability that I find is there in real life, but isn’t there when you sit down and intellectualise a scene or a role”.

but if they’re shown as human beings, there’s no judgment.”

I thought: it’s not going to be film-making, but it’s going to be close.”

That is, I think, the only way to represent people in films. Not black or white.

It was very important to create the characters so that they go through a journey in different times during the film.

but when I’m a different person 15 years from now, there is some kind of distance that allows you to appreciate certain things.

What I do is maybe watch my films like 10, 15 years later and just see things.

I never try to say anything with the films that I do.

comedy with a tragedy interweaved in some parts of it.

If we’re making a fictional film, and we’re creating a world, why can’t we have our own rules about this world?

We tried to use language that felt contemporary, and we didn’t try to imitate the way we thought people spoke at the time

The dancing is definitely not accurate to the period

But it felt interesting to show that contradiction. It’s different from what we’re used to seeing.

It was so tiring, seeing all these films about men and politics and people that run things.

Those power dynamics in little groups of people feel like something you’ve always been interested in, in your movies

what we keep from the history and the things that we invent; the story we want to tell and where we want to focus; and how we are going to simplify the politics so that it is evident it’s affected by the women’s relationships but also feels relevant to any period.

very elaborately representing the politics and the actual, [historical] story in minute detail.

I came across the existing screenplay and I felt that it was a very interesting story, with very interesting characters.

dim view of human nature and the sense that human relationships are always, at root, about power.

rigorously bleak assessment of human motivations and behavior.

Lanthimos, his camera gliding through gilded corridors and down stone staircases — in exquisitely patterned light and shadow, with weird lenses and startling angles — choreographs an elaborate pageant of decorum and violence, claustrophobia and release. The law of the kingdom is mutability, signified by the many names its sovereign and her subjects are called by. Sarah is Lady Marlborough, and also Mrs. Freeman. The Queen is Mrs. Morley. Abigail plots to marry a handsome doofus (Joe Alwyn), hoping to acquire a title of her own. No identity or value is fixed. Alliances shift like the weather. Fortunes rise and fall. Beauty transmutes into ugliness and back again. Love is a synonym for domination, or maybe for submission.

The queen is imprisoned by grief, by tradition, by her own uncooperative body. She is also a free spirit.

But it’s also true that the queen is the only person in England capable of — or entitled to — sincerity. She alone is able to mean what she says and to get what she wants.

The most abject figure in this universe is the queen herself, whose illnesses, eccentricities and neuroses make her seem helpless and pathetic, easy prey for opportunists like Abigail and Sarah, who push her wheelchair and tend to her moods.Image

They transport the viewer into a world where conventional distinctions — between private feeling and public display, between honesty and guile, between life and theater — do not apply.

Sarah, who has known the queen since they were children, is her lover as well as her adviser in governmental matters. An ally of the parliamentary leader (James Smith) and the wife of an important military commander (Mark Gatiss), she pushes for war with France and heavy taxes on landowners.

Anne, plagued by gout, grief and self-pity, functions as the hypotenuse of a discreet erotic and political triangle

Even with Anne (Olivia Colman) as head of state, patriarchy rules the realm,

Lanthimos, a Greek director

affairs of state and of the flesh, both of which figure prominently here

Yorgos Lanthimos narrates

audacious final reveal, the story wraps up a little abruptly, resulting in a muted denouement

as he relays tales of mounting public opposition to the queen, on account of her decision to raise taxes (at Sarah’s behest) to continue waging war on France.

but who arrogantly underestimates the women he hopes to manipulate.

“I like it when she puts her tongue inside me.”

But despite Abigail’s ulterior motive, there’s a moving tenderness to her courtship of the queen, which comes to stand in stark contrast to Sarah’s matronly bedside manner.

Sarah is directly combative, while Abigail maintains an air of sweetness and decorum even as her scheming grows diabolical.

But when the heartbreaking reason for this is later revealed, it affords Colman the opportunity to transform Anne in an instant from grotesque caricature to fully formed tragic figure

Lanthimos treats his characters here with a degree of compassion, rather than regard them with his usual smirking indifference.

unflinching fixation on the queen’s increasingly diseased and defective body.

resembling a voguing contest.

The film also recalls Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in its sly anachronistic flourishes;

notably the first of Lanthimos’s films to be written by others,

to assert his idiosyncratic worldview.

themes of casual cruelty and petty jealousy among the idle aristocracy are more familiar

relatively historically accurate to boot.

Adding to the sense of unpredictability is the film’s cheeky reversal of traditional gender roles

isheye lenses, Steadicam, panning, dolly shots, rapid montage.

The majority of the film is shot from extreme low angles, rendering the bejeweled and heavily painted actors larger than life.

also his first film written by other people.

The Favourite is also Lanthimos’ first foray into an all-out period piece

Abigail, also based on a real person

gout.

Sarah alternately lavishes with affection and scolds like a child.

does count discomfort and disorientation among the most reliable tools in his directorial kit.

“Cut out his tongue and eat it.” “Which is sort of cannibalism,” says Masterson, laughing. “I was just so horrified by that. But he thought it was funny.

Song Kang-ho said everybody thinks this is a wall, but actually this is a door, and then they explode it and go out. If we erase the borderline between the door and the wall …”

“That process allows him to fully control what the cut is going to be, and the result ends up being very original,”

The protagonists fight back with debris and Molotov cocktails in a scene clearly plucked from the director’s activist days.

Clouds of tear gas were a near-daily presence during Bong’s first two years on campus.

College campuses were regular battlegrounds where students demonstrated for the expansion of democratic rights, labor unions, and reunification with North Korea.

“Before it’s a massive, sociological term, capitalism is just our lives.”

In his view, our world is already a dystopia, and all tragedy and comedy flows from this fact.

Bong’s work reflects anxieties he feels every day

like a candy bar with a razor blade tucked inside.

“Only Netflix guaranteed 100 percent approval of everything to me: the final cut and the rating.”

I ask what he thinks of the fact that no Korean film has ever been nominated for an Oscar despite the country’s outsize influence on cinema in the past two decades.

After all, he felt a little like Okja, the titular pig, going from Korea to New York only to get dragged all the way to Paramus in order to get sliced and diced for mass consumption. But as the story would have it, both the pig and the movie survived intact.

Instead of a wide release, it got a limited one.

Let’s cut out more.’”

I’m dedicating this shot to my father.”

train guard guts a fish in front of the rebels as a show of intimidation.

“Let’s cut out the dialogue.”

‘Harvey Scissorhands,’

Bong Joon-ho and Harvey Weinstein