Three Queens To Rule Them All

SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL, but friendships between women can be among the thorniest flowers on earth.

- Stephanie Zacharek

We often stand together, and need to do so for survival. But women, like all human beings, have flaws and frailties that sometimes tip into the red zone of defensiveness or distrust. Envy takes root like a weed; competitiveness becomes a blood sport. The complications are even greater for ambitious women making their way in a world dominated by men. Is the woman in the next cubicle your ally or your secret enemy? And if she’s the latter, can she somehow be turned into the former?

Long before any of us had careers to build or corporate ladders to climb, there were women trying to untangle these very questions—and they were ruling actual countries. This is the movie season not just of powerful women, but of women in power: Mary Queen of Scots, the film debut of theater director Josie Rourke, and The Favourite, from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, both give us women whose crowns, for one reason or another, do not rest easy on their heads.

In Mary Queen of Scots, Saoirse Ronan plays the ill-fated Queen, married to France’s King Francis II until, as an 18-year-old widow, she came back to her home country. The movie begins with that return to Scotland, and Ronan’s Mary— serene but resolute, with skin like a veil of morning mist—looks so at home in this rugged landscape that you wonder how she’d ever managed to leave it. Mary writes her cousin, the Queen of England, Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie), eager to forge a union and optimistic about the future: “Ruling side by side, we must do so in harmony, not through a treaty drafted by men lesser than ourselves.”