There is something to be said about that stare.
It is not, as Bowie once sung, a ‘gazeless stare’, nor it is one of pure alarm and fright; instead, the way Sir Daniel Day-Lewis stares at both fellow actors populating the silver screen and at us is both charismatic and chilling, both intriguing and insidious. Whether he is a heroic scout and a chivalrous romantic hero, a showboating grandiose villain, a ruthlessly ambitious oilman or even the finest American president ever, that stare is probably one of his most recognisable and indelible trademarks, be it gazing admiringly, unblinkingly at Madeleine Stowe or sizing up everyone around him with ravenous fury.
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s marvellous ‘Phantom Thread’, the ace actor’s supposed swansong before retirement, that famous stare drops its guard.
Day-Lewis is Reynolds Woodcock, a highly touted dressmaker, an effete and efficient craftsman entrusted with the task of dolling up the dames and damsels of the crème da la crème of London’s social elite. It is the 1950s, the exclusivity is still hard to shake off and routine rituals of pomp and show are observed to remind both the old-timers and the newly young that the Empire is still alive.
Does Woodcock care, though? Obsessed with the smallest detail of his craft and life, he is, for all warm familiarity with ladies who are transformed, in his studios, from women to decorated mannequins of flesh to be gaped at by spectators and snobs, nothing less than a lone, wizened wolf. He lives in seething unease with his equally frosty sister Cyril and cares little about his lovers and even less about their talents at breakfast.
Everything is clockwork for this suave yet often inscrutable man when, all of a sudden, a visit to the countryside, feeling predestined, changes everything inside him.
The girl who wins his fancies, for once and for all, is Alma, a sweet, if somewhat slippery, waitress at a diner where he stops for his breakfast. Anderson ratchets up the sparks with disarming deftness; Woodcock orders a breakfast of sumptuous, salivating proportions while Alma is quietly bemused and after she has noted it all down, he grabs it away, egging her to remember everything that he told. She succeeds and wins his heart and his rarest of smiles and dubs him ‘hungry boy’. Sure, they have hit it off now.
It is at this juncture in the film when Anderson hits the only note of comfortable familiarity before pulling the rug beneath our feet. After all the initial reluctance at courtship, Woodcock and Alma are now facing each other, him besotted in his unending gaze aching with a heart-pounding silence while she counters it, remarking with much bravado that he cannot win this ‘staring game’ for long. Almost on cue, relieved of the need to put on an act, Woodcock drops his guard, by now a prey to her not-so-explicit charms.
That is, when he is not wearing his glasses, though. Once he slips into them, the scene runs dry of all warmth and poignancy and instead of the dashing, distinguished lover, we have the devilish artist neglecting even the woman who stole his heart as he pores over her measurements indeed, while she stands in front of him and the coolly cold-blooded Cyril, confronted suddenly and almost callously with all her inner fears and insecurities.
The writer-director has dabbled in romance before, too and not only the odd yet perceptive love-hate homoeroticism that flourishes between his flawed and overarching male protagonists, but also in the ravishingly quirky ‘Punch-Drunk Love’. But this is already something else, something deeper, more twisted and even grotesque as the elaborately spun plot unfolds, laced with bitterness on the edges of that immaculate beauty. ‘Phantom Thread’ is a stunning film, silken in its grace and yet stifling and sudorific in its tension, its core of gloom beneath the rich glamour underlined pointedly by the most minute and telling of details.
Initially, Alma cannot quite help herself but stare at everything in wonder. Reassured confidently by Cyril that she is a perfect fit, if only that Woodcock likes a ‘little belly’, she plunges willingly inside the artifice of his life only to be repulsed by what she sees. Even that is secondary, nevertheless, to the way she feels so peripheral to his demand for perfection and even decorum. Anderson, always assuredly a gifted storyteller of real punch, bursts the bubble of doe-eyed innocence early on; a scene at breakfast, made tense by the sound of a knife scraping a slice of toast with Jonny Greenwood’s melancholic, almost mesmerizing swells in the backdrop scraping at our hearts, explodes without warning into discord and the stage is set for heartbreak as Alma tries to tease out the battered, world-weary soul inside the shell of this seemingly indifferent, even slovenly man.
Woodcock, who does not miss a single detail with his discerning eyes. Woodcock, who fusses over meals and loathes the gala parties to which his admiring patrons invite. Woodcock, who is aroused when Alma knows for sure what he needs and even shares his snarky nihilism as a partner-in-crime. Woodcock, whose first reaction on being surprised by the woman he loves is to ask for his sister’s whereabouts. The man is all these twisted, confounding and even perverse things and yet none of them because he is not quite the monster as he seems; he is just trapped in a stifling domestic space where his feelings are trivial and his only escape is his art. Anderson has built an oeuvre of lambasting and lamenting society’s resident snake-oil salesmen built on false strength and hollow confidence, from Frank T.J Mackey in ‘Magnolia’ to Lancaster Dodd in ‘The Master’. Woodcock is not even the king of his domain; he is prey to the firm and unrelenting grasp of Cyril’s hold over the household and dreams of his mother. It is like one of those brilliant romantic thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock made in the 1940s, except that the stakes feel even more deathly than ever.
That resemblance to early Hitchcock is not a coincidence, really. Anderson's film is less about the broader brush strokes of the narrative, which become Macguffins (except one damning detail that becomes the axis on which the whole moral compass of the film swerves) and more about the little details and the finely embellished layer of subtext that thickens the stew with relish. There is enough sweltering suspense crammed amidst both conversations and silences, in stolen glances and smiles of compromise, in the way Woodcock arches his majestic brows or how Cyril, played with eerie effect by a terrific Lesley Manville, stays poised forever on the brink between indifference and affability. There is also enough perverse comedy bursting at the seams when it sniggers at the sagging flesh of mediocrity beneath those meticulous dresses but also in the juicy, almost Wilde-like dialogue that these fascinating performers sink their teeth on. Alma sums up her commitment to Woodcock as giving away 'every part' of her while the latter, in the film's finest line, remarks cuttingly but elegantly as ever that he is admiring his gallantry to eat the asparagus prepared by her.
As always with the director, 'Phantom Thread' compliments its heady intelligence with craft that absorbs as much as it makes our jaws drop. Mark Bridges' dazzling costumes, from lacework and gowns of satin to Woodcock's checkered coats, flutter across misty interiors in the film's ethereal yet earthy frames which take the spell-bound audiences on a waltzing serenade so much that the film brims with crackling vigour even when confined inside the imposing walls of houses. Yet, the inexorable feeling of claustrophobia lingers, so much that when the film flits outdoors, we are overwhelmed by the relief offered. I am still at a loss by wondering just whom can I credit for that highly dramatic and always immersive cinematography (as a fun fact, it is reported that Anderson shot the film himself after regular collaborator Robert Elswit could not join the ride). It looks and feels like 'Barry Lyndon' on a nuanced and much more intimate scope.
Any battle of sexes is made even more deadly when there are equally matched players on both sides and it is in this crucial bit that 'Phantom Thread' that delivers a literal sucker punch. Vicky Krieps is unbelievably smashing as Alma, a self-doubting, innocuous lass morphing uncannily into a shrewd lover, who would never share her man with anybody, or rather anything else than her. Her soft glances, looking deceptively demure, are contrasted perfectly by his piercing, razor-sharp glare. By now, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis can master a role even in his sleep but there is yet again something unpredictably engaging, something again hypnotic about how he fleshes life, acid and anguish into Woodcock. He nails both the excellent lines and the almost unbearably tense silences with both seething anger and tender vulnerability and there is something quite unsettling and unforgettable about the way he lets those magnificent eyes and that dapper face do the talking. He looks handsome as he always has looked but it is when he refuses to drop his steely gaze while ruminating on an omelette that he leaves you bewildered and besotted in equal measure.
This is then to be expected. Coming a decade after 'There Will Be Blood', the previous tour de force in which the director and the actor outdid themselves, 'Phantom Thread' is more than just a fitting follow-up; it is a film woven of a cinematic fabric unlike any other. Like any of Woodcock's creations , it is tailored with jaw-dropping finesse and yet, like his signature tricks, has many a secret message hidden in it. Secrets that come out tumbling like skeletons in a closet, even one shared by a couple.
My Rating- 5 Stars Out Of 5
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