'The Favorite' aka 'Intimate Power', is a low rent, seedy but want to be pseudo-classy, Swiss-American co-porduction based on a novel written (I am not making this up) by a Greek royal, based on a legend that Naksidil Sultan, the preferred consort of two consecutive Ottoman sultans, murderer of a third and mother of a fourth, was actually Aimee du Buc de Rivery, a French heiress and relative of Josephine Bonaparte, who was supposedly lost at sea in 1788 at the age of 19.
The story has Aimee abducted by pirates who sell her to the Sultan, who at first she resists but then comes, reportedly, to love. Presumably this was less of a problem with the Sultans much younger nephew who succeeded him. The film has the good fortune to have Amber O'Shea in the lead, an at best mediocre actress whose career never amounted to much, but who the camera just loves.
This a pretty ridiculous movie, which gets most of its production value out of location shooting and somehow getting F. Murry Abraham to play the first Sulton and the capable Jack Smight (Harper, No Way to Treat a Lady, Airport 1975) to direct. Trash with a pedigree, but watchable. *
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