A good start to awards season for The Favourite.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, an Irish piece produced by Element Pictures, has taken two major prizes at The 75th Venice Film Festival.
The historical comedy snatched the Grand Jury Prize – famously considered the second most important prize of the evening – and the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress Olivia Colman, who plays Queen Anne in the hugely praised film.
Colman, who seemed genuinely moved by the award, read from a piece of paper on which her husband had written out a message in phonetic Italian.
The actor said she was, “in love with Venice” and so happy the festival was “in love with the movie” in return.
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The ‘Golden Lion’, the award that is widely considered first prize at the event, went to Alfonso Cuaron’s black-and-white Mexican drama Roma.
This is the first movie from Netflix to take such an honour at a major festival. Last year, Guillermo del Toro scooped first place with The Shape Of Water which went all the way to a Best Picture Oscar.
The Favourite centres around Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone who play royal cousins constantly at each other’s throats with savagely witty schemes and baroque costume drama. They aim to please Colman’s Queen Anne, who sits on a politically untouchable pedestal in early 1700s Britain.
Lanthimos – whose films The Lobster and A Killing Of A Sacred Deer took Hollywood by storm – peppers the story with jaunty dollops of classical music which play in heavily ironic counterpart to the immature tomfoolery of the scheming madames.
Clip via ONE Media
It will be released worldwide by film studio Fox Searchlight, opening in US cinemas on 23 November and in Ireland on New Year’s Day.
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