Any film that contains a character credited as 'Nude Pomegranate Tory' is deserving of our attention. It transpires, however, that this is only the most modest of reasons to be interested in The Favourite, the magnificent new film by Yorgos Lanthimos which as a parable for our troubled times provides precious little by way of encouragement.
The film looks amazing. Baroque starts at the point when the dial has been turned up to eleven, so now we are at, to coin a phrase, eleventy stupid. Pictures, tapestries, wallpaper, dresses, wigs are all off the scale and then there is an amazing improvised routine that starts somewhere in the vicinity of a formal dance like a Rigaudon before moving into something more akin to a high kicking Tarantella as envisioned by a New Romantic practising to be a cheerleader. Clearly that doesn't end well.
There are vaulting sexual politics in that all of the men are treated as dolts and idiots by the three women at the centre of the court and the action. These women all adopt personas: one largely apeing masculine stylings; another much more traditionally feminine and between them a Queen who lives in a personal fantasy world, in which rabbits play a major part, as a response to the sadness of having 17 children none of whom has survived and who is plagued by gout and other illnesses. The way that these women empathise but also psychopathically manipulate, satisfy (in all senses) and exploit the others is a delight but also a tragedy given greatest effect in the final astonishing phantasmagoric sequence.
The film is all extreme angles, sinuous movement and mirrored curves; a fluidity that is truly baroque - the kink in the pearl from which the term derives. There are corridors of which the hotel in The Shining would be envious. Dark corners in which candlelight makes hardly an impression or shows up only faces protruding from periwigs. Whispers in galleries and half seen or half heard events. Some of these are the very stuff of blackmail and high politics when or if they emerge into the daylight. What you know and who you know it from is the very stuff of power.
For we are in a time of extreme faction. We are amongst the Whigs and Tories. The country is viscerally divided over an issue - in this case whether or not to end the War of the Spanish Succession. The landowners see their taxes rising and their tenants being wiped out on the battlefield; the merchants do not want their trade limited by the French.
In the real world thousands of men are being killed and maimed in one of the bloodiest wars of the 18th century. Yet the issue is considered solely in terms of the interests of the patrician figures who inhabit the corridors of power in Whitehall Palace. The death and destruction is of little moment compared to unblinking ideology and personal and party advantage.
Just momentarily I saw some contemporary parallels.
These are people seeking to manipulate a figurehead for whom most have barely concealed contempt. So much of the game is about who can make the Queen say what they want to hear. Is the Land Tax going to be raised to pay for the war or cut because the war is ending? Is Marlborough going to have a big house built for him by the state or sent abroad to spend some quality time with his family?
Again, fleetingly through the fog of centuries something chimed.
Who is seeking to have their voices heard? Arrogant posh boys. Naturally. These people are hopeless, arrogant, unthinking and uncaring products of extreme privilege who think everything is solved by debating tricks, intimidation and influence by virtue of birth and social standing. People who simply cannot bear not to get their own way and who expect deference as a matter of course. A clique who spend all of their time with each other in a club to which entry is denied to everyone else. Most appallingly everything is as an endless game. A group of dilettantes for whom actual expertise is of no value since it would question why they were in charge in the first place.
Strangely, this also reminded me of a few people.
There is also genuine violence under all of the finery. Casual violence towards women and anyone inferior and deliberate violence towards equals. You definitely don't want to be anywhere close to the Duchess of Marlborough or Mrs Masham when they have some firearms to hand.
Bullying, intimidatory behaviour. Nope, think we've moved on from that. Haven't we?
Finally, after all the deceptions and lies which have played upon real fears and insecurities, often in the most cynical and manipulative of ways, there is the realisation of what winning actually means: on your knees rubbing the gout ridden leg of your monarch whilst being held by the hair. That wasn't what winning was meant to be all about.
All of which brings us back to the nude pomegranate tory. He is most certainly a tory, he's naked and his colleagues are finding is quite hilarious to pelt him with pomegranates. At the time, along with pineapples and other exotic fruits, pomegranates were the absolute preserve of the most wealthy stratum of society. As one might say, only the best people are subject to deluge of pomegranate. It is a moment of pure Bullingdon buffoonery.
Alas, no pictures of the nude tory are available.
But here is a smashed pomegranate.
