Phantom Thread: Love by design

Falling in love is easy. It is pleasurable and it is fun. Its overwhelming headiness is exciting, intoxicating and energising. Falling out of love is easier. It is painful and it is unnerving but it rewards one with a strange, if unwanted, sense of relief and liberation. Staying in love is not easy. In fact, it is excruciatingly difficult. The list of factors that makes it so is dreadfully difficult: jealousy, suspicion, distrust, codependency, dependence, obsession, manipulation, control, resentment, boredom, ennui, selfishness, unresponsiveness, insouciance and a lot else. These elements conspire to make it all but impossible to stay in love and be at peace.

The problems of staying together, even when in love, are real, arduous and burdensome. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread deals with the painful reality of being in love, and examines the problem with great intellect, heart and insight. Unflinchingly honest, deeply aware and highly intelligent, it may well be the best film about love, made in years, if not decades.

Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis), a renowned fashion designer and a man of meticulous routine, lives and works in an elegant five-storey Georgian townhouse. He is surrounded by intensely reverent staff members, exuberant clients and a commanding business partner and sister, Cyril (Manville). Reynolds, the celebrated creative head of the House of Woodcock, designs, inter alia, for the British aristocracy, European royalty and rich Americans. He is in awe of himself and the life he has created. He works with the feverish ferocity of a true artist, proud of every exquisite dress he has designed, every fancy inch of fabric he has cut and every splendid stitch he has sewn. Cyril is cold, imperious and strong. She takes care of her brother and runs the practical affairs of their fashion house business.

The success of the House of Woodcock and, indeed, of her brother depends as much on her as it does on Reynolds. Women come into and go out of Reynolds life with regularity. He gets bored with these women easily, leaving the job of evicting them from his painstakingly organised life to Cyril. This she does, without upsetting his punctilious regime, with both efficacy and kindness. Things change when Reynolds meets Alma (Krieps), an émigré waitress, at a countryside hotel. As many women before her, she soon takes on the roles of muse, servant and lover, but, unlike the others, wants a relationship on her own terms, where her importance matches that of the fêted designer. The relationship – troubled, unpredictable and decidedly perverse – forms the heart and mind of Phantom Thread.

The film is great as much for what it is – a highly intelligent examination of the nature of love – as for what it is not: a conventional story about the battle of the sexes. Its characters, very similarly, are defined as much by what they are as by what they are not. Reynolds is needy, vulnerable and egotistical. He is not a selfish and self-centered man. His toxic masculinity is studied and is not a real problem. Cyril is a capable, self-respecting and a confident woman. She is not an ageing spinster who validates her own existence by taking care of her brother and running his business. Alma loves Reynolds with a devotion bordering on servility but expects love in return for her love. She is unwilling to relinquish the power that she believes is needed to maintain a relationship with Reynolds.

The three principal characters of the film are highly complex and complicated. And although a backstory for Alma is largely missing, Anderson has written the three with great care, perspicacity and intelligence. They require – and deserve – the very best of actors. That they find them in Day-Lewis, Manville and Krieps is the great fortune of Phantom Thread and of everyone who watches the film.

Day-Lewis, who is known for his rigorous methods and immersive approach to acting, interned with Marc Happel, Director of Costumes at New York City Ballet, for a year to prepare for the role of Reynolds Woodcock. Since the film is said to be loosely based on the life of famous Spanish fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, Day-Lewis remade a Balenciaga sheath dress from scratch to gain an understanding of his character. His performance in Phantom Thread is flawless. In a manner that only he can, he makes Reynold’s eccentricities and flaws both believable and charming, while avoiding any hint of caricature.

The performances of the two primary female actors of Phantom Thread are equally good, with Manville’s possibly outdoing even that of Day-Lewis. The British actor plays Cyril with great dignity and poise.

Watching her inhabit the character and confidently walk around the house, wearing high-necked black dresses and high heels, is a true pleasure. She brings an air of self-possession to the character that makes it real, interesting and important. Manville’s Cyril dotes on her brother, takes care of his needs, and runs the business of the fashion house, but knows that her brother and the business need her more than she needs them.

Krieps delivers a remarkable breakthrough performance as Alma. Timid and awkward at first, she comes into her own as an actor, as Alma allows herself to be reinvented by Reynolds. Hers is a complicated role. She lets Reynolds and Cyril hurt her Alma but, in her turn, is ready and willing to hurt the siblings in equal measure. Her motives are murky. She has the tough core needed to stave off the inevitable fall of the House of Woodcock, just as Cyril must have done in the past. Her steely manner is unnerving for both Cyril and Reynolds. Krieps takes over the role with ease and comfort. The Luxembourgian actor conveys an innate sexiness, and a hint of menace, in her remarkably understated portrayal of Alma.

Phantom Thread has many areas of strength — direction, acting, cinematography, writing, production design and costumes, but the one thing that is truly outstanding is its score. Jonny Greenwood uses great music to effectively create a sense of time and place. His sumptuous score highlights the varying emotional tones of Anderson’s screenplay. He employs Debussy’s harmonies, Schubert’s melodic pieces, Oscar Peterson’s jazz music, Berlioz’s symphonies, elements of Beethoven’s music and melodies from the 1950s, bringing them all together with a rich original score. Greenwood’s ambitious, eclectic score enhances the mood and sentiment of each scene, without ever undermining the actors’ performances; indeed, the performances benefit greatly from the score.

The title, Phantom Thread, refers to a Victorian era phenomenon in which seamstresses, exhausted by brutally long workdays, continued to go through the motions at home, sewing imaginary threads in the air. It refers to the ties – invisible, imperceptible and incomprehensible – that Reynolds, Cyril and Alma work tirelessly to maintain, in their quest for love, validation and respect, ties that may or may not exist.

This article was published in the Herald's March 2018 issue. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.