Let them eat irony

The Favourite (d. Yorgos Lanthimos)

An ahistorical historical film. Imagine the film’s scenario in the present, like the way the dancing sequence indicates, which by the way has been done to startling effect at least 15 years ago by Sofia Coppola and a teenybopper Heath Ledger movie, there’s no way the film’s representation of women can be deemed kosher. The message is that women with power have lesbian tendencies and their idea of intimacy is dictated by cruelty and manipulation. They will cut their fellow females. It’s a nice male fantasy. Who is this movie for? I’ve always asked this question with regards to Yorgos’ films. Previously, I surmised that they’re for the hipster crowd and that it’s this hipster irony that makes his films travel from Greece to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I think they are for people who think cruelty and nastiness as edgy. I also think they’re for the culturally feeble minded who mistake high concept for profundity. (Yorgos makes films in the same camp as Haneke. More cruel=more art.) The frame of the story is sturdy enough, with its intriguing and sellable concept, but his characters are one-dimensional, really. There’s not enough motivation for the Emma Stone character to get dirtier once she has climbed the social ladder. Earlier, she is associated with books, a kind of thoughtfulness, but this idea is dropped, because it turns out that’s not the point of the character. The ending is artsy fartsy nonsense because that’s not really an ending, not even a decent Persona evocation, but a cop out, a mysterious enough series of images, of insincerity, multiplied.

#2019 #11