PHANTOM THREAD
It was etched as cinematic event from the moment word got out that ‘Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Fashion Project’ was a thing: the director of There Will Be Blood reunited with its transcendent star, Daniel Day-Lewis, in what the actor was claiming would be his final-ever screen performance. No one knew what it was about, but who cared?
Now that it’s arrived, and titled Phantom Thread, the questions about the film still linger. What is it, exactly? A love story? A battle of the sexes comedy? A psychological thriller? A ghost story? A satire of the Great Male Artist? A valentine to artistic devotion and exactitude? An Oscar-bait shrine to Old Hollywood glamour? A wry wrinkle on period-piece wealth-porn? Or, maybe, in some ways, all of the above?
If that sounds like a wild ride, or a mish-mash of genres, it doesn’t play that way. Phantom Thread takes its directorial pulse from its setting, and its subject: a fashion-designer in 1950s London. He’s named Reynolds Woodcock, but, as much as PTA and DDL sniggered with glee when they came up his name, it’s not played for lulz: the House of Woodcock an entity of estimable prestige, where royalty, celebrity, and big-money come to get their evening gowns sewn.
Anderson, in turn, fashions something akin to a sumptuous period-piece, revelling in every length of fabric, its weight and texture, its sheen. There’s tactility in its 35mm stock, too; texture in the celluloid, as in the fabric. And whilst there’s more camera movement, and cuts, than in his twin directorial masterclasses — There Will Be Blood and The Master — there’s always a sense of control and command in every inch; Anderson echoing the fastidiousness and exactitude of Woodcock’s creations.
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And Day-Lewis plays a controlling, commanding character. Woodcock is a fashion-designer of a different era; a pre-modernist time in which classicism rained (there’s a great scene, herein, where Day-Lewis spits the word “chic”, with all its echoes of modernism and trend, as the most detestable slur). He’s a creature of habit, a man of routine, a “confirmed bachelor” who cycles through a host of live-in ‘muses’ expected to sit quietly, prettily in the corner, to be subject to the whims of his beck and call, and to chew their toast quietly. On opening, we see Camilla Rutherford in that role, at the end of her rope; pissed at being sidelined, hurt by Day-Lewis’s declining affections. For the designer, such drama — such not-at-all-English displays of emotion — are mere distraction. And, so, he gets his ever-present off-sider, sister Lesley Manville, a severe woman in pinned-hair and pearls, to send Rutherford on her way.
On a trip back to his old family home in the countryside — which delivers astonishing shots of a sports car hurtling along back roads, the camera mounted on it bouncing slightly from the force — he meets Vicky Krieps, all blushing cheeks and chestnut hair, a bumbling waitress at a local restaurant. With a ‘muse’ vacancy back at the House Of Woodcock, she’s soon whisked away from her humble life, into a world of luxury and finery, serving as live-in model, housed in the room next to Lewis’s; but, notably, much further down the totem-pole than Manville. Keeping her in her place aids the preservation of Day-Lewis’s precious routines, which must be observed or else his ire is earnt.
In those times when Anderson leaves this House — those wild rides down country roads with the devil at the wheel; a trip to the Alps, snow gleaming; a virtuoso sequence at a bawdy New Year’s Eve bacchanal — Phantom Thread is shot through with unexpected light, and life; given a jolt of energy that knocks the audience sideways. Inside the dark hallways, wallpapered rooms, and wooden-doored chambers of the House Of Woodcock, however, there’s a feeling of certain death; like we’re living in a mausoleum, a grand shrine to an egotistical male from a distant time.
Anderson was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and Jonny Greenwood’s classical score openly evokes the florid romanticism of classic Hollywood scores. There’s a key contemporary comparison, too: like Darren Aronofsky’s gleeful cinematic assault mother!, this is a film about the terror of the Great Male Artist; it, too, is largely confined to a singular house, and features a younger woman suffering under the weight of toxic masculinity and unchecked male ego. But there’s none of that film’s ridiculousness; nor is there, even, some of Anderson’s own ridiculousness, fans of his loopier pics (like Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, or Inherent Vice) may find themselves suffering, too, under the strictures imposed in this portrait of exactitude.
But there’s an unexpected, almost indescribable quality to Phantom Thread that makes the film memorable, unique; a pulsing unease that exists beneath its fixed routines and period-piece luxuries. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, drama can take hold in a sterile world, and, slowly, the foundations of the House Of Woodcock start to wobble; Krieps starts to fight against her place, to kick against the tyranny of patriarchy. Day-Lewis’s reign, over character, narrative, and camera, is slyly undermined, the film, tilting, towards his muse. In turn, the film sets the unknown Krieps opposite this retiring titan of cinema, and watches her stand her ground, as an actor. It’s hard to know what to make of this film, these characters, their relationship, and the meta-text to it, but being wrongfooted by Anderson is a pleasure unto itself.
HAPPY END
If Michael Haneke has fanboys, then Happy End is for them. The Austrian filmmaker has made his mighty-auteur’s name via a series of searing, grim, foreboding films, and, here, he makes reference to almost all of them. Here, we meet a wealthy French family filled with dark sexual secrets and deathly desires. Fantine Harduin moves into their cavernous old-money mansion after she’s drugged her mother into a coma. Her dad, Mathieu Kassovitz, has a new wife and baby, but he’s also engaged in an online affair. Isabelle Huppert keeps the family business going, fighting against a case of criminal negligence, showing all the corporate cruelty against her workforce she can muster. Her son, Franz Rogowski, is the black-sheep failure: hang-dog, drunken, dancing to Sia. And paterfamilias Jean-Louis Trintignant is waiting around to die; and, if Harduin wanted to give him a hand with that, he’d be grateful.
It’s a familiar Hanekean work: a lacerating satire of bourgeois privilege, modern-day alienation, societal fears, and sociopathic youth. There’s kids video-taping their acts of brutality, eerie CCTV footage, news reports of global horrors spliced into the narrative, the family house as failing fortress, and, as in almost all Haneke films, a family named Laurent, and characters named Anne and Georges (the director employing the same names, over and over, to show his use of the family unit as trope). Beyond that, there are moments here that offer direct reference to Benny’s Video, Code Unknown, Caché, and Amour. In a lesser filmmaker’s hands, this might come off as pandering; or, perhaps, as a director lacking in inspiration. But Happy End is as exacting, angry, and cruel as any Haneke film, thereby ‘earning’ its right to explicitly situate itself amongst the rest of them.
MENASHE
In an ultra-orthodox enclave of Hasidic Jews living in New York, a hapless widower fights for custody of his son, who, after the death of his wife, was placed in the house of other family members by a rabbi. It’s a simple set-up, but it hardly suggests the real pleasures of Joshua Z. Weinstein’s film, Menashe, a movie spoken almost entirely in a language rarely seen on screen: Yiddish. And, the lesson, always, when watching a story spoken in unfamiliar tongue, and set in an unfamiliar world, is one of empathy: beneath the beards and payots, there’s a recognisably human story; unfamiliarity made familiar.
Like many films about cloistered communities (like The Wound, see below), it’s a portrait of a world rarely seen on screen, made about people who don’t watch films, let alone act in them. Given the specificity of its realm, Weinstein had to employ non-professional actors, often first-timers. But he hangs the drama on Menashe Lustig, fashioning a story in which art imitates Lustig’s own life; his own struggles to stay connected with his son when local religious wisemen charged that no child should be raised by a single father. This gives the story real resonance, the vérité of its approach matched to truth in its drama. But this isn’t a ‘plight of’ movie, in which a free-spirit type simply suffers at the hands of an oppressive society. Instead, it’s a funny, heartfelt portrait of one of cinema’s most eternal archetypes: the sad clown.
THE WOUND
As a portrait of African masculinity, and a depiction of the taboo of queerness in cultures prizing macho hardness, it’s certainly not surprising that The Wound has already been dubbed ‘the South African Moonlight’. It’s a snappy turn of phrase aimed to lure in festival-goers and menu-browsers, but it’s a reductive shorthand. If we really wanted to get down to it, the real comparison would be ‘kinda like Moonlight, just with more barbaric adult circumcision rituals’. John Trengove’s film is set amongst the Xhosa, an ethnic group in Southeastern South Africa out to preserve their tradition and ritual; which includes sending young men away for a rural rites-of-passage ritual, in which they pass through into manhood via a ceremonies in thrall to the male member.
“What’s the purpose of a dick, anyway? Is it really such an important instrument?” asks Niza Jay Ncoyini, a young charge who resents being dragged from his urban, urbane life out to the middle-of-nowhere, to take part in ancient ritual. He’s queer, even if he never speaks it aloud, clearly comfortable in his own skin; unafraid of asking questions about archaic values and provoking those adults who serve as guides to the young initiates, who are complicit in upholding old ways. It cuts especially close to home for a pair of closeted men (Nakhane Toure and Bongile Mantsai) who use the annual ritual as a time to renew their secret, forbidden liaison.
Trengove’s film duly courses with bristling homoeroticism and toxic masculinity, with an air of sexual transgression lacing everything with a sense of added danger. Here, codes of manhood are strict, unforgiving, violent; so entwined with tradition that they erase empathy, individuality, modernity. Coming-of-age movies where closeted youths fall victim to repressive societies are many, and much of The Wound, for knowing filmgoers, with feel plenty familiar. But its setting, and its story, is so singular that the film has real resonance and specificity.
