United States, 2017
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
With Daniel Day-Lewis (Reynolds Woodcock), Vicky Krieps (Alma), Lesley Manville (Cyril Woodcock), Brian Gleeson (Dr. Hardy)
Build around a confession and set in a dated and rarefied world, “Phantom Thread” chronicles a love story drifting from the quiet domination of the male lover to the kinky passion the female lover vows to impose. The richly textured film slowly explores a subtle confrontation that enables the woman to assert her vision and pleasure over a remarkably repressed and control-obsessed fellow.
The first pictures of Reynolds Woodcock thoroughly depict the perfunctory gestures he makes every morning to get dressed and ready for the day. The first dialogue around the breakfast table plainly shows a female lover is definitely denied the right to ask questions and act in an unusual way – confrontation of any kind is rejected under the cold gaze of his sister Cyril who stands as the guardian of his brother’s habits. This is a deeply ritualized life allowing Reynolds Woodcock to thrive in his trade quietly – he is a successful fashion designer in the 1950s London, with Cyril in charge of the management. He is a demanding and determined creative mind whose charm belies a selfish pursuit of pleasure and tranquility. He is satisfied with a life spent for the most in a huge, stylish but cocoon-like mansion which is a home, a workshop and a shop where rich customers, sometimes from abroad, look for the fine garments they hope would make them happy.
He meets Alma by chance, on a weekend visit to his country house. She is a waitress and she is right away seduced by this suave gentleman who is some thirty years her elder. Reynolds’ courtship strategy involves gourmet meals and dress fittings – as if he was looking for a model as much as for a girlfriend. The bond is tentatively made and the country girl starts to work for him, and live with him.
Trouble is, Alma is more serious about the relationship than Reynolds and wants it to be on her own terms, even though she respects her lover’s peculiar traits. A clash is inevitable, driving her to inflict pain on him, by way of mushroom poisoning. After a dreadful night when she nurses him on her own he survives and decides then to marry her. But the marriage raises new problems, in particular his nonacceptance of her need for entertainment, and the unsafe mushroom is cooked again. This time, however, Reynolds is aware of what is coming and willing to suffer again, to let her once again take care of him as she likes. And life would go on this strange way, as she tells their physician, Dr. Hardy.
Reynolds’ rituals include thinking about his mother every day and sewing small strips of fabric with words embroidered on them inside the clothes he designs (the phantom thread giving the movie its title). These two quirks are even combined in some of his clothes where locks of hair of the dead mum are inserted in the fabric. His emotional dependence on his mother is quickly affirmed. She taught him his trade and she was his first model – he even sewed her second wedding dress. That his sister controls both his business and parts of his life highlights his unwillingness to live beyond the familial origins. As Alma denounces it at one point, rituals are just a way of keeping things along and seduction is just a game; behind them stands the untouchable soul of a man pretending to be strong but whose balance is fragile and whose creativity relies on maniacal behaviors and odd ideas (like his phantom threads or the folk tales about wedding dresses he narrates to her). Alma’s challenge is to shift the paradigm so as to exist with him and just not besides him.
She rises to it in an unnerving way. Reynolds’ readiness to understand and to submit, even if his acceptance comes late and after many tantrums, suggests how much he enjoys being emotionally dependent on a kind of female figure. He reluctantly but clearly leaves behind his mater’s memory to embrace his new Alma mater – although this new bountiful mother teaches him more than skills and familial piety as she shows him the more incredible extents of sexual love. He proves to be the opposite of his claims and vindicates Alma who has always thought him fragile; his sheepish commitment to her contrasts with the confidence she has always displayed, in particular when she confesses to the doctor (in fact to the audience as the camera leaves him off-screen in all the confession shots save the last one). But this is still a journey from a protective bosom to another, the new one being tainted by perversion.
The deepest crisis in the first part of their life in London comes with the order of a wedding dress by a Belgian princess; it drives Alma to poison Reynolds out of jealousy and resentment at his growing disdain for her; but it ends with their marriage, and the second and final part of their shared life that sees his submission. The bold but fluid series of events interlocks many threads the story is spinning, from the contradictions of a man who deals with weddings and women but will not commit himself to the life-changing event his dresses embody (beyond whatever happens with the phantom thread and the wedding dresses, there are other enjoyable ambiguities, like turning a dress fitting into a job recruitment and a love affair or the case of the customer uncomfortable with her engagement dress and fainting in it, prompting Alma and Reynolds to take it back, to save it and also because there is nothing anyone can do with such a customer), to the troubling links between loving and nursing and even more love and death, and to the uncanny ability of lovers to understand each other. “Phantom Thread” is shot with a smooth but striking elegance, a nicely oblique sense of telling bold feelings, and full confidence in great actors – Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps – who rely less on simple and short dialogues than on nicely calculated postures and looks to tell an unusual story, a man lately blooming at the hands of a darkly playful woman.