"Before Phantom Thread was released, a friend of mine commented that, though she usually looked forward to Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, she'd be skipping this one. She had no interest in, as she put it, another movie about a brilliant, tortured artist who is abusive to his loyal muse. I could see how she could get that impression from the film’s trailer, but the brilliance and pleasure of Anderson’s film is how he subverts that expectation at every turn. While designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) fits the 'tortured artist' mold in many ways, with his uncompromising manner and meticulous attention to detail, Anderson is less interested in celebrating him than in puncturing his obsessive routine with the arrival of Alma (Vicky Krieps), his new would-be muse. Though Alma is in awe of her lover’s work, her refusal to fulfill the role of a passive and ultimately disposable clotheshorse upends Reynolds’s hermetically sealed existence, ultimately rendering Phantom Thread as a portrait of the artist as a petulant, fragile boy. One of the movie’s driest running jokes is that it’s not even clear Woodcock’s dresses are any good, or if it matters.
"And this is a movie with many jokes – one thing that seems to have been partly lost in discussions of Phantom Thread is that it’s a comedy. Anderson is often compared to Kubrick, and Phantom Thread’s severe, rigorous visual style invites the comparison (not to mention its visual references to A Clockwork Orange), but Anderson also shares Kubrick’s adolescent sense of humor. Besides naming his main character 'Reynolds Woodcock' after Day-Lewis texted the name to him as a joke, Anderson has fashioned what is, on the surface, a highbrow British period piece around a bluntly scatological metaphor for relationships. Whether one considers the games Alma, Reynolds and his sister/manager/life partner Cyril (Lesley Manville) play in the film’s second half abuse, co-dependence, kink or an exaggeration of the routines all couples create for themselves (or all of these at once), this is a tasteful, visually sumptuous movie in which vomit and diarrhea are signifiers of emotional attachment. The bodily fluids are kept offscreen, as are Reynolds and Alma’s sex life; food is substituted for onscreen coupling, with a series of increasingly fraught meals charting their relationship through infatuation, lust, malaise, commitment, more malaise and, ultimately, bliss. In fashioning his own Rebecca, Anderson has taken the repressed tensions of gothic romance to their logical, sadomasochistic end. It’s a deeply perverse film, and yet I wouldn’t trust any couple who claims they can’t relate to it on some level." ~ Andrew Bemis
No comments:
Post a Comment