The Phantom Thread

Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of The Phantom Thread, burst upon Hollywood in the late 1990's as a maximalist film maker.  His signature movies often encompass lengthy periods of time, involve entire industries and systems of production, and have epic qualities:  Boogie Nights (1997) chronicles the pornography industry in the San  Fernando Valley in the seventies; The Master  (2012) is, among other things, about the rise of Scientology in the fifties and early sixties; There will be Blood (2007) is an account of an entire industrial sector -- the oil business in the late Victorian era.  By contrast, Anderson's most recent film, The Phantom Thread (2017) although set in the world of high fashion exposes nothing to us about that industry and seems to be based on material that is not a story at all, but really nothing more than an anecdote -- the narrative is slight to the vanishing point.  Thus, by contrast with Anderson's earlier films, this lavishly produced movie has almost no content -- it is, in effect, minimalist when compared with most of the director's earlier oeuvre.  (The movie that Phantom Thread most resembles is Anderson's bizarre Adam Sandler picture, Punch Drunk Love ( 2002). 

The premise of the film is simple enough:  a monomaniacal and narcissistic fashion designer at the height of his fame, engages in a love affair with beautiful waitress that he has met while on vacation at the sea shore.  The designer, Reynold Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is wholly devoted to his art --  his private life is managed by his sister, Cyril.  (One of her primary assignments is to dismiss girlfriends in whom the great man has lost interest).  After about a half of hour of happiness, the designer tires of his déclassé girl friend and finds her profoundly irritating.  This is conveyed the device of amplifying the sounds of her eating at breakfast when the great man sketches ideas for dresses -- the girl, Alma's teeth grind thunderously at her muffins and toast and her cutlery screeches across her plate.  Woodcock lets his sister know that he wants Cyril to get rid of the girl.  But the girl fights back -- she goes into the woods, finds a deadly gilled mushroom, grinds it up and puts  it in Woodcock's tea.  He is poisoned and almost dies -- in his delirium, he sees a vision of his mother, with whom he seems to have had a strange, half-incestuous relationship.  (He speaks of her wedding, dress, implies that  he stitched it himself, although the gown is now "ashes" --  the dress stands as synedoche for the woman in this enigmatic episode.)  Woodcock survives his poisoning and, now, finds himself once more dependent on Alma whom he now marries to the horror of his sister.  They immediately quarrel again and Alma punishes him by once again poisoning her husband with the deadly mushroom.  (The relationship continues and, in a flash forward, it is implied that Alma has a baby.)  Woodcock comes to understand that the price of his love for Alma is that she will periodically poison him to revenge herself for the suffering that his arrogance, jealousy and narcissism inflicts inevitably upon her.  (She poisons him the second time in the movie when he refuses to go dancing with her on New Year's Eve, a wild sybaritic spectacle of masked revelers who parade under gas-lit candelabra in a procession involving giraffes and elephants -- it's a wild Bacchic phantasmagoria that seems a sort of fever dream.)  The problem for the viewer is to work out why the picture is set in the world of haute couture in London.  The story could theoretically involve any great man -- Woodcock could be a master builder or a great chef or any kind of artist, for instance a painter like Lucien Freud (in several scenes Woodcock seems to have several of Freud's portraits on his walls).  In many ways, the film's milieu seems to me purely arbitrary and, in fact, the fashion industry is not explored in the film but, rather, merely assumed as a setting for the action.

Of course, we could walk around in the world with our "poor, fork'd nakedness" covered with burlap or some other shapeless fabric.  But this is not what human beings do:  rather, we take pains to make ourselves look resplendent in our clothing:  we augment ourselves with our garments and define ourselves in that way.  Similarly, there's nothing in this rather minor story that requires the somber spectacle that Anderson uses for his mise-en-scene -- the film is lavishly, if austerely, beautiful.  His slender subject is cloaked in an densely morose and portentous style.  At one point, Woodcock defines the mood in his home as "an air of quiet death" and this funereal tone pervades the movie.  Every shot has a mortuary aspect -- lavishly composed, mostly static, an atmosphere graced in many images by sfumato effects associated with cigarette smoke.  Anderson uses atmospherics devices to convey his meanings that I have never seen before:  when Woodcock drives his car, we have a sense that he is always just about to crash the vehicle, to steer it ecstatically off the road.  This effect is achieved by mounting the camera a few yards behind the car but not using a steadi-cam -- we feel every bump in the road and every veer and deflection in Woodcock's steering:  it's a simple effect but exceedingly expressive.  In another scene, Woodcock drives in the dark -- we have the same ominous feeling that he is about to loose control.  This drive seems to occur in some sort of spectral Hades:  we can see behind the car that a powerful white light is shining up from the ground and illumining the bare trees from below:  what is the source of that white light?  The scene late in the film in which Alma goes to the woods to find a poison mushroom is similarly lavishly beautiful but austere:  we see her in a static middle distance shot -- the poison mushroom is a speck growing between the root of a big bare tree:  Anderson has confidence that the audience will see the mushroom although it is very tiny -- he doesn't zoom and does nothing to highlight the mushroom:  he simply lets us pick it out on the screen before cutting away -- it's a daring way to stage the sequence (indeed the shot is a sequence shot), but also tremendously expressive.  In general, the lavish imagery in the film resembles a cross between the super-saturated canvases of John Singer Sargent with statuesque women in glowing satin garments that gleam like torches in the darkness and some of the more exquisitely mannerist films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, particularly the German's sado-masochistic masterpieces, Martha and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant -- which in fact involves the fashion industry.  Anderson shows fabric for garments being cut and stitched -- this is done in portentous super-close close-ups.  Woodcock has a dozen old women who work for him and, gradually, we see these women as something like the Parcae -- or fates; one of the achievements of the film is to restore the sense of terror and inevitability to the woman's work of weaving and sewing and cutting fabric:  the huge close-ups always suggest that someone is about to get badly cut or that a pin will penetrate flesh:  the cloth seems almost living flesh, strands of soul-stuff that these Fates or Norns can cut and, then, restore at will.  The film's compositions are all intensely mannered and allegorical designed:  in one sequence of shots, toward the film's end, we see the hero and Alma eating breakfast -- the use of a telephoto lens squashes the characters together so that we see Woodcock's fork poised, it seems, to pierce Alma's throat.  In the next scene, we see Alma's face in tight close-up with a lacerating pin pointing outward, the needle held between her lips.  The two lovers seem to be threatening one another, although this is merely implied by the compositions of the shots. 

So what is this all about?  The film remains deliberately enigmatic.  Woodcock tells us that he sews a secret motto into his wedding dresses -- but we don't know what motto he put in the dress he designed for Alma to wear on their wedding day. (The wedding dress he is making when Alma poisons him the first time is stitched with the words "Never cursed").  Alma seems some kind of muse -- she seems to come from nowhere and has a faint indescribable accent (the actress playing the role is from Luxembourg where she is a major star -- before this movie, she has worked in German and French films; her English is so pitch-perfect that she has only a haunting ghost of an accent.  Alma seems to embody literally the hero's problematic relationship with memories of his mother -- when Alma poisons him, he sees her returned to haunt him in her ghostly wedding dress.  Alma also materializes the deadly relationship between the artist and his muse -- Cyril tells Alma that her body type, with a slight belly and no breasts, is perfect for the garments he designs.  His muse and incentive for his genius is also the thing that is destroying him. 

Although Anderson's film is rapturously staged, it is quite tedious -- the movie strikes and holds one pitch only for 130 minutes.  There's not enough story to carry that length and so the picture will fundamentally bore most audiences -- it's fascinating for its film-technique but the allegorical anecdote is insufficient for its length.  You should see this movie and draw  your own conclusions.  I admired the picture intensely but also found it cold and repellent in some respects.  Boredom is not a criticism of a film like this -- many of Fassbinder's films that I always found intensely dull on first viewing have stayed with me in one way or the other all of my life.  I suspect this film will have a similar impact on me.