Yorgos Lanthimos’ new movie, The Favourite, opens in the UK on New Year’s Day, having already swept up major international awards and enjoyed the biggest success at the US box office of any recent British independent film. Its story, set in England during the first decade of the 1700s, is of how Sarah Churchill, 1st Duchess of Marlborough (played by Rachel Weisz) was usurped as the royal favourite of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) by her lowly cousin Abigail (Emma Stone). The movie is no “straight” historical costume drama, however. It has been highly fictionalised throughout, in Lanthimos’ distinctively eccentric style. This does not mean that the film wears its history lightly, nor that it lacks ambitions to convey certain larger biographical truths. Indeed, where exactly it does and does not choose to stick to historical fact is particularly intriguing.
One of the film’s more subtly feminist ideas is, maybe ironically, the way that the leading ladies’ physical bodies are emphasised. Queen Anne has no fixed image in our national consciousness, but now – given the movie’s many scenes of Anne in a wheelchair, hobbling along palace corridors in a deranged state, or with poultices being applied to her painful limbs – it is unlikely that anyone will think of her without thinking of her semi-invalidism. At the time, the royal doctors considered Anne to be suffering from gout, severe myopia and the blighted womb of a “mater infelix” that seemed incapable of giving the nation a living heir. Modern medics now suspect her to have been suffering from a type of lupus (erythematosus), which can cause chronic arthritis, repeated miscarriages, red skin rashes, and joint pain in hands and legs. This probable lupus was compounded by obesity in later life, a symptom more of her enforced immobility than of her appetite. Even at her coronation, Anne had to be carried in a sedan chair, which rather undercut the allusions that the text of the ceremony made to her as another great warrior queen like Elizabeth I.
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