The Favorite

This film has all the trappings of a B movie.

The costuming is remarkably bad (there's tulle and lame everywhere), the acting is hokey, and the writing a little less than mediocre.

But I _love_ this film nonetheless. I own it and watch it every now and again. I enjoy the cheesiness, and it's best enjoyed with a friend or two over drinks and hearty commentary and giggles. It's a wonderful orientalist film with glitter and glam mixed with quite a bit of fantasy.

It is based on a true story, and I am surprised every time to see it was actually filmed at Topkapi palace.

It's 1784 France. Aimée Dubucq de Rivéry chafes under the strict nuns. She is too independent and her uncle sends her back to the nuns. Pirates capture her ship and she is kidnapped to Algiers ending up in the Ottoman Sultan's harem. She resists being renamed and the scheming by Sineperver (Maud Adams). Sultan Abdul Hamid (F. Murray Abraham) picks her and she refuses. When he offers to not sleep with her, she relents. She becomes his favorite and gives him another heir. Sineperver's son Mustafa is in line to be the next Sultan and she sends an assassin to kill Aimée's son. The Sultan gives her Mahmud to adopt. The Janissaries are restless for war against the Russians but they are outmatched without modern weapons.

This is a strange movie. It's half exploitative melodramatic romance. It's also a period piece historical drama. It's reminiscent of a pulpy romance novel. Surprisingly, this has a couple of interesting veteran actors. On the other hand, the lead is a young amateur although she's not the problem. Amber O'Shea definitely has model good looks. She has spunk and that is charismatic enough. The production is lower value but the locations are pretty good. This is cheese but I must admit that it's memorable cheese.

Although I can see where the dissers are coming from, I found this film charming. Yeah, the script and acting could have been better, but man, what a story! Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, cousin of the French Empress Josephine, captured by pirates and sold into the Turkish ruler's harem, in later life ends up transforming Turkey into the modern age through her son. She was known as the Sultan Valideh, the Veiled Power, and she made herself and her son a bridge to the West.

She must have been something and a half, and Amber O'Shea, with a pretty crappy script, somehow manages to sell it. And of course any harem run by F. Murray Abraham is my kind of harem.

All in all, a pleasant couple of hours. I await the REAL movie of Naksh, the Sultan Valideh.

As Tulip dies, notice how carefully he handles the vase in his hands. This is, undoubtedly, due to the fact that the props were returned to Pier 1 the day after the shooting finished.

Intimate Power has yet to meet its full destiny on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

What I saw was a throwback to cliché-cluster flicks of decades ago, but the soundtrack puts it firmly in the eighties.

It is thumpingly and enormously awful, as wretched and phony a film as could be conceived. Tittering harem ladies a'bathing, stern Turks delivering script bits from the 100 Most Popular Stock Lines for the genre. They might as well have gone beyond the scattered skin peeks to a fuller soft-core intention -- all pillow-plush and pleasures in the sultan's palace, because that's already the quality/ambiance/performance level of much of this thin 'n cheesy production.

The producers may have scored the perfectly suited shooting location, but much else in the movie seems to be reaching for the furthest reaches of inauthenticity.

Admissions: There is amusement, even delight, in encountering something so consummately lame, in wondering who could work on it and think for a moment this embarrassment should be taken seriously. I really did laugh out loud a few times at this painfully acted, double-dreadfully written, obliviously directed caricature. Maybe I WOULD view a portion of it again, preferably with someone else. "Look!...watch this! Watch!"

And..I only made it through the early half. Turned away easily without even the tiniest rhinestone of regret. (A bug buzzing by in the living room could be diversion enough from this bungle.) Could be...could be that when it moved deeper into violence and intrigue, into dramatic seizures(!) of fate and steering of history, it took a turn toward something more engaging and more plausibly presented. Could happen...right?