The Favourite is one of the least sexy films ever made about lesbian relationships. And somehow, it’s directed by a man.  

Last week, The Favourite (2018) was nominated for ten Academy Awards. It’s an excellent film that certainly deserves the awards and press. It is also a fabulously unsexy film in spite of a plot driven by the power and sexual dynamics between its female leads. There are no shots in the final cut with the sole purpose of titillating the audience, and the camera refuses to objectify the three women who reign over the screen. Most shocking of all, The Favourite achieves this while being directed by a man. 

The Favourite feels revolutionary because Yorgos Lanthimos, the director, respects his female characters and dares to honestly depict, but not exploit, their sexuality. The history of lesbian representation on-screen, as with all female representation in general, is marred by the male gaze. There is a long list of critically acclaimed male directed works that use romantic relationships between women as excuses to pander to their own fantasies. We’ve almost grown immune to the way the camera leers at its female subjects, and how our cinematic heroines can spend inordinate amounts of time prancing about in their underwear or in the nude.   

The constant sexualization and objectification of female subjects becomes even more cringingly apparent in films that focus on romantic relationships between two women. The critically acclaimed Blue is The Warmest Color (2013) features extraordinarily graphic sex scenes, framing the protagonist’s coming of age story entirely through her sexual experiences. It was directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and won the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival (The reader may wish to note that the actresses have since spoken out about Kechiche’s abusive on-set behavior, and this fall, Kechiche was accused of sexual assault). 

Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos in Blue is The Warmest Color. 

Blue is The Warmest Color is not an unloved film. Audiences, especially members of the LGBTQIA community, have embraced the story and characters. People are invested in the central relationship. They love how the film literally shows the light and color that falling in love with another woman brings into the heroine’s life. And they continue to love the film in spite of how the camera treats women, because there simply are not other films that tell these kinds of love stories. 

Despite this near universal praise, Manohla Dargis, wrote in The New York Times, that “the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else,” and that “Mr. Kechiche registers as oblivious to real women.” What makes this all the more disturbing is that Kechiche’s film is based on a graphic novel written by a woman, Julie Maroh. The film banished the novel’s framing device and plot, keeping only the visual motifs and title. It is a man’s vision and desires that dominate a film supposedly about women. 

This is the true tragedy of Kechiche’s film. His vision overpowers the women who came before him, his camera leers at his female leads, and yet, his film is celebrated by the community of whom he takes terrible advantage. We have become so desensitized to the intricacies of the male gaze that we see it as a necessary expense listed on a receipt for representation. The male gaze has become a mandatory service fee, but we do not need to pay it. 

Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman in The Favourite. 

The Favourite is also based on female penned source material. Deborah Davies, a woman with no prior screenwriting experience, wrote the film’s original screenplay in 1998, but producers struggled to finance a project that contained “lesbian content” and very little male representation. When Lanthimos signed on as a director, he hired Tony McNamara to update and tighten the script. Yet, The Favourite never feels like a man’s film about women. 

The three lead characters are complex, often unlikeable, and always fascinating. Everything feels bizarre and unnerving, and for once, it’s not because of leering camera angles or illogical nudity. Every sex scene-every intimate moment-drives the plot forward, altering and twisting the central relationships between the three women. Those scenes do not exist merely to titillate an audience, they are there to tell the story. 

There is only one scene of female nudity in the entire film and it feels natural, as if the character made a calculated decision to expose her breast. In reality, the nudity was ultimately the actor’s idea. Emma Stone made an on-set decision to appear topless though the script called for her to be covered with a sheet. 

As much as it should be celebrated, Lanthimos’ success in making a mainstream movie about the sexual relationships and power dynamics between three women could be credited to circumstance. As a director, Lanthimos tells stories that are odd, uncanny, and uncomfortable. There’s the darkly funny matter-of-fact dialogue in the grim yet curious world of The Lobster (2015), and the grotesque absurdity of the central family in Dogtooth. His work seems to want to disturb, rather than please, his audience. Perhaps, Lanthimos does not overly sexualize Queen Anne and company on screen, because he does not seem to care about making his audience happy. The male gaze is about pandering to male heterosexual desires. Lanthimos has no intention of pandering to anyone. 

Regardless of the reason, it’s still fantastic to see that a male director can banish the male gaze from a production, and it still hurts that in 2019, this is not the norm. Lesbian films should be allowed to exist outside of a sub-genre in the catalog of erotica, and audiences should not have to compromise when it comes to representation. Stories about flawed complex women, who exist for more than a man’s pleasure, should be told more often, and male artists are not incapable of doing so. Let’s hope that Yorgos Lanthimos’ work on The Favourite becomes the standard rather than the exception. 

Author: Ora Damelin is a film student at Columbia College Chicago. She loves sharing her opinions on cinema and is delighted-and somewhat befuddled-that they are now online.