Drama – Page 3 – Camera Coverage

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

the favourite 1

“I must take control of my circumstance. I’m on my side, always. As it turns out I’m capable of much unpleasantness.”

Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek director that has first gathered international attention in the big film festivals with Dogtooth (2009) and has since then gradually gained public attention. Despite the many quirks and particularities of his previous projects, one of the big changes going into The Favourite is that it is the first film in which he worked not having written the screenplay with his associate Efthymis Filippou. This will be a big shift of style and pace from the unusually paced dialogues characteristic of his previous films. Despite this significant transformation in the dialogue, visually Lanthimos is working with some of the most unusual camera placing and most dynamic camera movement in all of his filmography, this being even more noticeable if we consider that The Favourite is at its heart a British costume drama.

This film revolves around the somewhat unknown historical figure of Queen Anne, and plays with the relationships between her majesty, her main advisor Lady Sarah Churchill and the newcomer servant Abigail. The whole piece revolves around the power struggle between these three characters in a way that has been compared to All About Eve (1950), being that it mainly focuses on the scuffle between Lady Sarah and Abigail for the Queen’s attention, love and their privileged position in royal affairs. If we try to deconstruct the film we will quickly realize that beneath all of the witty, sharp and corrosive dialogue there are layers upon layers of different motivations that lead our characters through this love triangle.

“Sometimes it’s hard to remember whether you’ve loaded a pellet or not.”

What we gather from The Favourite is actually a really kaleidoscopic combination of themes in a story that could be dismissed as mostly politics. In the background we have the grand scale of the war with the French and in the forefront we have all the personal intrigue surrounding our three main characters. The dynamics between these two levels of politics are presented in a much more interesting and creative way than what is expected considering the film’s plot. But again, while this may seem like the core to the film (and is the core to many other films), The Favourite goes beyond and above, constructing all this political talk in a much more important and universal foundation that combines the matter of relationships with the matter of personal emancipation, all bound together by a sense of real tragedy and pathos revolving the central character of Queen Anne. This allows the viewer to be challenged and agitated, but especially helps in engaging the viewer, by never creating distance between both the film’s main ideas and its undertones, avoiding what could be either a wearisome and bland political allegory or an incomprehensible pretentious mess.

The dialogues and acting are witty and poignant and they never reduce the film into a predictable period drama. This is not necessarily due to the fact that they deal with unashamed and violent sexual language and cathartic situations, but instead in it allowing the viewer to engage with its complicated web of themes, something that in previous Lanthimos films was made really differently if not even in a slightly faultier way. The presence of the absurd, particularly the visual absurd, is still a big part of The Favourite, even if it takes a smaller and different role than in films like The Lobster (2015). As mentioned before, the camera is frenetic in The Favourite.

Despite some critics making visual comparisons with films like Barry Lyndon (1975) or The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) (and rightly so to some extent), Lanthimos’ take on the period drama ditches the expected formality of the genre. The camera is on the ground, on the corner of the room, by the window, it follows the corridors at the oddest angles. This combined with the heavy use of the fisheye lens give the film an edge that elevates the already combination of the oblique motley of themes in the picture, giving it a sense of a nightmare, a weird historical hallucination that seems to play on your subconscious. All of this put together with a truly eclectic soundtrack that goes from the expected baroque music of the time, to deeply sentimental slower paced string tunes, descending gradually into being experimental and dissonant, creates a dynamic that accompanies the visual queues of the film in a no-less than brilliant way.

An example of the use of fisheye lens and the odd camera placement in what could otherwise been a regular scene in court.

Complete with what is probably Olivia Colman’s best performance, together with the work of an incredible supporting cast, The Favourite is the most well-rounded of Lanthimos’ film. This sense of completion and unity does not mean that it is a linear and simple film, and not being a straightforward film does not mean that it is not accessible to pretty much anyone. The themes and subjects I mentioned are just a personal selection, but things like the exploration of the gender roles, that the film could be a possible exercise of pastiche and parody, or the viable but more complex psychoanalytical readings of The Favourite are all ideas that are easily interrogated by anyone that watches it. It is one of my favourite films of 2018 and I would say it is up there with The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) for Yorgos Lanthimos’ best.

8 out of 10

Directed by Julian Schnabel

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“Maybe God made me a painter for people who aren’t born yet”

On At Eternity’s Gate Julian Schnabel, director of the critically acclaimed Le scaphandre et le papillon (2007) turns again to the art world for inspiration. 23 years after Basquiat (1996), inspired by the troubled life of street artist Jean Michel Basquiat, it’s now time for an exploration of the later days of Vincent van Gogh. Despite the many decades that separate the life and death of the two artists, both were misinterpreted visionaries whose works came to be known as revolutionary after their deaths.

Biopics and homages of van Gogh are too many to describe in this review. From Vincent Minelli´s Lust for Life (1956), to the Akira Kurosawa´s marvellous tribute in Dreams (1990) where the painting Wheatfield with Crows (1890) is referenced in one of the shots. In 2017 came out Loving Vincent, an animation film using 65,000 frames of oil painting on canvas, inspired by the painting technique of van Gogh.

This film focuses approximately on the last 2 and half years of the Dutch artist. It begins with van Gogh (William Dafoe) meeting the also acclaimed French painter Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac) and their stay in the French small town of Arles. All the known episodes about the artists life, from the breaking apart with Gauguin, the cutting of his own ear as well his stay in a mental asylum and controversial death are represented in this film.

One of the great things about At Eternity’s Gate is the great performance of William Dafoe in this picture. Although having almost twice the age of van Gogh at the time of his death, Dafoe establishes a believable portrayal of the anguish and pure joy the painter experienced during this period of his life. The director focused with great care at the expressions in the faces of the actors, with the constant use of close-ups. Like Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the close-up on someone’s face does an astonishing job of making the spectator feel the pain as well the joy the character must be feeling at the time. The scenes where van Gogh paints, the switch between the focus on the quick brushstrokes and the emotions manifested by his face truly transports the viewer to the pure bliss of painting. These few scenes are when the film really outshines itself, together with a warm but at the same time gloomy solo piano soundtrack.

Schnabel experiments a lot with the camera work. Besides the above-mentioned close ups, which work quite well and give texture to the film experience, the overemphasis on a half-blurred lens in some scenes starts to get a little bit tiring after a while. The sound experimentation works better. In the church scene, where Gauguin announces his departure to Paris, leaving van Gogh completely shattered inside is a great example of this. The lines spoken by Gauguin repeat in van Gogh’s head at the same time he is hearing more information from the French painter. It helps to represent better the pure exasperation that van Gogh was surely feeling at the time.

The echoes of Gauguin’s voice inside van Gogh’s head

Van Gogh is represented as a fragile man where the only person who appears to comprehend him is his own brother. A powerful bond which is well represented in this film, especially in a scene where the two lie down in an hospital bed, after one of van Gogh’s breakdowns. He feels that the world doesn’t comprehend him, and laments when he says, “I have a menacing spirit around me.” The connection between mental illness and acts of pure genius is sometimes hailed as logic and unavoidable. As if madness is the only way of achieving greatness and that every genius has a little bit of a madman inside him. This image of a deranged gift is unjust, and a lot of times given to artists like van Gogh. In one of his many marvellous letters to his brother Theo he refers that a “grain of madness that is the best of art”. He knows his limitations and how deeply they affect him. The film tries to explain, with all its flaws, that the mental problems were an issue that incapacitated him to do even more, and not the source of all his brilliance.

The painting where the title was drawn from represents a figure of an old man with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, in a clear sense of despair. In a way, Schnabel tries to make van Gogh a martyr of his own geniality. The last scenes of the film almost try to glue the image of saint-like to the painter. The forgiveness of his alleged killers (his suicide it’s still an unsolved mystery to this day) give him a Christ in the cross kind of aura.

Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate) (1890) by Vincent Van Gogh; oil in canvas; Kröller-Müller Museum,Otterlo

At Eternity’s Gate tries to transport the viewer closer to the experience of the Dutch painter using every tool possible. It’s not a perfect film but tries to give a fair representation of van Gogh away from the mad genius stereotype. It shows all his brilliance as a painter and his difficulties as a man. The experience of painting on cinema at its best.

7 out of 10

Tag: Drama

The Favourite (2019)