Phantom Thread (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ 

Phantom Thread (2017) – P. T. Anderson

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “fashion film” is actually nothing about fashion (except perhaps as a working example for a partial study of the creative process itself). Instead, this is a film about relationships between people, how we react and respond to each other’s needs and personalities – and how we choose behaviours to complement or counteract those of our partner.  Daniel Day-Lewis again plays a domineering and powerful archetype, focused only on maintaining the conditions that he feels allow him the perfect environment for designing dresses for the rich and elite in 1950s London.  He always has his own way and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) polices his rules among the staff and others who enter the house.  However, it is clear that she is able to maintain her own independence and can resist his tempers, if she chooses.  Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis) is a confirmed bachelor but appears to have made a habit of inviting young women to live with him as model, muse, and seamstress; then, when he tires of them, they are discarded, sent away by Cyril. Enter Alma (Vicky Krieps), a foreign waitress, who is seduced by Woodcock to take up this role.  However, she has ideas of her own about how the dressmaker should be treated.  Thus, the film vibrates to a set of tensions between Woodcock and Alma and between Alma and Cyril.  Woodcock hallucinates visions of his mother in her (second) wedding dress that he sewed for her, suggesting a persistent need/desire that perhaps Alma will fulfil for him.  Is it possible that we unconsciously select partners who can satisfy these (largely unconscious) wants? Or is it really the luck of the draw and bad pairings will out themselves?  As the movie progresses, it is hard to know which pattern will prevail.  As with previous Anderson films, the period design and cinematography are exquisite, all the more incredible because Anderson apparently served as his own Director of Photography with ample assistance from his camera operators and other crew members.  Although most of the film takes place inside Woodcock’s lavish house (a chamber piece, then), the shots that are outside are like a breath of fresh air, especially those night-time driving scenes in the Bristol 405.  Anderson manages to capture different textures by using various forms of natural light (including the scenes where Alma speaks to the young doctor by firelight) and there is no denying that his artistry is being sustained at a peak; his films are all worth watching and anxiously awaiting.  That said, Phantom Thread takes its own sweet time developing its relationships and its central tensions and resolution (if resolution there be) and it is necessary to be patient and perhaps even to re-watch this one to absorb its subtle pleasures.