I don’t generally rush to see Oscar winning movies. If they were ‘worthy’ I’d have seen them on first release. Unless we were too busy in which case I wouldn’t. Got that? So for various reasons, I missed The Favourite. Which was nominated for every Oscar imaginable, except for Best Short Animation, and won just ‘best actress’ for Olivia Coleman. Who played Queen Anne. The last of the Stuart Monarchs. Don’t ask me to name the rest, but I’d guess at a James or 2, probably a Charles, the odd Mary.

And The Favourite is a great film. Really great. It looks fantastic, the sets and costumes are exactly what you’d expect, if not hope for, and the cast brilliant. Oh, and its very funny. Probably much much funnier than real life was in the early 1700s.

Watching such a movie as ‘entertainment’ is fine. Watching as some form of ‘education’, a type of enlightenment about a period/person we know little about, is a bit different. But that’s ok. Firstly there’s ‘artistic license’ which enables the writers to fabricate whatever they want as long as no helicopters appear in the War of the Roses. Satnav systems are completely out of the question. Because in the early 18th century, instead of all this modern wizardry and technology, they had mud. Shit-loads of mud. It was everywhere.

And then there’s the fact that information is scarce from ‘way back in ‘istory’. So although we have fully documented laws and records, its much harder to ‘know’ the people underneath the titles.

So they made Queen Anne a raving loony. Which she could well have been. Inbreeding in Europe’s monarchies reached catastrophic point by Victorian times with every monarch being no more than a second cousin from every other as pacts and treaties were tied up by marrying off kids. Princess Szyekvska of Moldova (8 years old) would be married to Prince Jean-Marie, as soon as he was born. They were siblings. But from different parents.

When Anne was on the throne, the real power lay with her best friend and (if the movie be believed) uber-bully, Lady Sarah, the Dutchess of Marlboro. Whose husband, the Duke, was the nations leading general and invented cigarettes. Rachel Weisz was fabulous as Lady Sarah. And Emma Stone (who I just love) was brilliant as yet another conniving, controlling bitch-from-hell, manipulating everyone and everything to her needs and desires.

We learned that although Queen Anne was pregnant 17 times and lost them all, she was in fact a lesbian. How they learned this, I know not. But it added to the film. In which each and every man was portrayed as a be-wigged, rouged-up imbecile. But the women were strong. Holy shit were they strong.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx