Jordan Peele - Get Out [94 points / 16 votes]
Second place: Greta Gerwig - Lady Bird [117 points / 20 votes]
And the winner is...
Paul Thomas Anderson - Phantom Thread [164 points / 23 votes]
“Just by beginning Phantom Thread with an image of a woman (Vicky Krieps as Alma) sitting beside a gentle fire, Paul Thomas Anderson has begun his barrage of games, thrown up the first of his crooked mirrors. This is all a campfire tale, a ghost story, a warning to the curious, that throwing oneself into the flame of obsession, is not for the faint of heart. And then the music swells, doing marvelous Michel Legrand barrel rolls meant to land in our stomach, the camera ducks under a stairwell and sees women ascending as if to heaven. This it seems would be someone's dream, but it's a torture chamber nestled in blue flowered wallpaper, lavish meals and of course impeccable clothes. Each door improbably opened, each woman pinioned to a gown, remnants of the women trapped in Reynolds’ past. His homes are catalogs of jailed spirits, trapped in his memory and his walls like the little secrets Reynolds stitches into his garments.
“Anderson conjures this through apparent inattention. The doors are shut by Lesley Manville's Cyril quite plainly but we never see them open. He winds up the routine of his brother sister like a watch, showing how many thousands of moving parts keep them in motion long enough for the fashion their known for to be made. Every part of Reynolds is the product of careful grooming and Anderson lets us see all of the steps, down to his hair, which must deliberately look like David Lynch's. The light that assails Reynolds, Alma and Cyril is borrowed from Joseph Losey's A Doll’s House, captured splendidly by Anderson's own camera, and it curdles their resolve and affections, confusing and exposing them like vampires, Reynolds most obviously like Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness. They love and hate one another with the coming of dawn.
“Anderson brings the lights up and down on their perverse ménage à trois, their lockstep anti-courtship, literally sizing one another up (Cyril's first interaction with Alma, the list of smells, is perfectly sumptuous suspicion and disgust), understanding too late that they're trapped and still loving it. 'Normality' is miles behind now. The setting is the 50s, but the texture, the red dresses, sadistic hospitality, poisoned forests, dim cottages, icy retreats and lowlit hotels are all from the most perverse reaches of European film in the 1970s. The curses and superstitions seem to find these three, the way they found all lonely travelers from lapsed aristocratic ideals. Anderson films Reynolds like a mad scientist, his eyes always peering beyond what he can see and into a garment's potential, a relationship's future, his own imperiled destiny. He creates the space for their games by letting the music flower underneath of them, goading them into love, ignoring the ghosts and the anger, and fluttering through each space as if the camera itself were taking stock of the texture and shape of their life's trappings, not to make a garment but to memorize for a recipe. A film for the hungry, a warning to the curious.” ~ Scout Tafoya
No comments:
Post a Comment