Fashion, as Sunday night’s
Golden Globes “black-out” has shown us, can be a potent political
statement. All of those gorgeous movieland fashionistas who purged color from
their party frocks certainly made a point about female solidarity and the need
to end sexual harassment now. Though
many of their outfits were prim by Hollywood standards, some barely-there
numbers seemed, confusingly, to invite the sort of sexual attention their
wearers professed themselves so eager to decry. Still, I appreciated the monochrome
aesthetics of the gathering, and admired designers’ flexibility in coming up
with so many all-black looks on very short notice.
But enough about the vagaries of fashion, Hollywood-style.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread
looks at the world of dressmaking with a different eye. He’s interested in the
life of a London haute-couture house,
one charged with dressing the cream of international society from cradle to
grave. Heiresses and royals descend on the house of Woodcock to be fitted for
exquisite gowns, day-dresses, and wedding ensembles, each garment a hand-sewn
and timeless masterpiece. That’s the irony: in the eyes of designer Reynolds
Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his staff, the dresses are far more important
than the VIPs who will wear them. In one of the movie’s most exhilarating
scenes, a fabulous green ensemble is deftly rescued from the drunken body of
the wealthy woman who’d commissioned it. In Woodcock’s eyes, she simply isn’t
worthy of being entrusted with one of his wearable works of art.
Phantom Thread takes
place in the 1950s, when Post World War II Europe was celebrating a return to
high standards of luxury. Fabric is sumptuous; lines are classic. There’s no
desire to shock or surprise: that iconoclastic spirit would wait until the
following decade, when such rebels as André Courrèges and Mary Quant
democratized fashion, hiking hemlines and turning style into something for the
very young and very fit. For the wearer, the only surprise about a Woodcock
ensemble would be discovering the cryptic written message that the designer
tends to tuck into the occasional hem, a secret memo to himself and (perhaps)
to posterity.
In Phantom Thread there’s
an enigmatic young woman, played by Vicky Krieps, who (both literally and
figuratively) finds and decodes that message. Alma—whose name means “soul’—is a
tall, lean figure, first glimpsed stumbling awkwardly while serving breakfast
in a country tea-room. Her origins are obscure, as are her motives. But from
the first she seems willing enough to fall under the spell of Woodcock, who
sees in her proportions his aesthetic ideal. She quickly becomes his model and
his muse, but is not afraid to announce her own tastes and to chafe against his
more high-handed behavior. (Woodcock’s sphinx-like sister and business manager,
ominously played by Lesley Manville, completes a strange isosceles triangle.)
Midway through the film, Alma seems to be taking over the
story, daring to assert her own will in ways we wouldn’t have expected. Her behavior is so
boldly capricious that Phantom Thread starts
to seem like a different film, maybe one marked by a tinge of the supernatural.
Is Alma, perhaps, meant to be viewed as an allegorical figure in a tale modeled
after Poe or Henry James? Certainly, it’s easy to see her as the slippery muse
who holds the artist’s fate in her hands. But Anderson’s characters are far too
alive to ever be reduced to mere abstractions. The fact that they slip away
from us does not reduce their humanity. (Nor, of course, does the apparent fact we’re about to lose Day-Lewis to retirement. We need him too badly to let him
go.)
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