UK/USA  –  Drama, Romance  –  Year: 2017  –  Running time: 130 mins
Languages: English, French

Audience Response:

Rating: (4.0 from 19 responses)

• Excellent’: 8 votes
• ‘Very Good’: 5 votes
• ‘Good’: 4 votes
• ‘Satisfactory’: 0 votes
• ‘Poor’: 1 vote
• + 1 comment submitted without any rating

Read the comments here or visit our “Phantom Thread” discussion

Synopsis:

Set in the glamour of 1950’s post-war London, renowned dressmaker Reynolds Wood and his sister Cyril are at the centre of British fashion, dressing royalty, film stars, heiresses, socialites, debutantes and dames.  Women come and go, until Alma arrives to disrupt his controlled, carefully tailored life.  Is Daniel Day-Lewis appearing in his final film, as he claimed?  He is the perfect fit for this gorgeous visual, and aural, treat.

This is an old-fashioned film about romance that dares to play out like the love affair it depicts. It sweeps the viewer up in its embrace, whirls them from one emotional extreme to the next, leaving them exhilarated.
Alison Rowat (Scottish Herald)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Inherent Vice (2014) / There Will Be Blood (2007) / Boogie Nights (1997)
Cast:
Vicky Krieps                                    …   Alma
Daniel Day-Lewis                            …   Reynolds Woodcock
Lesley Manville                               …   Cyril
Julie Vollono                                   …   London Housekeeper
Sue Clark                                       …   Biddy
Joan Brown                                    …   Nana
(for full cast, and more information, see “Phantom Thread” in IMDB)

CFC Film Notes

The genesis of the film originated with Anderson but the development of the storyline and script developed jointly between Anderson and Day Lewis, who had of course worked with Anderson most recently in “There Will be Blood”.  Anderson had the idea of an interdependent relationship, a picture in his mind of man and a woman on a hill and then by chance read a biography of Balenciaga and from there we have got Phantom Thread.

(The title refers to Reynold Woodcock’s habit of sewing an embroidered phrase, as a message to a dead woman, somewhere into his creations. It is a phantom as only he knows it is there.)

Other influences were the films of Powell and Pressburger, David Lean’s” Passionate Friends”, plus “I know where I’m Going, “Rebecca ,”Vertigo’ and “Gaslight”.  The sense of 1950’s Britain and the world of the omnipotent couturier with his devoted clients is
sumptuously set against the inner regimented world that Reynolds Woodcock inhabits in his London house with his sister Cyril, whose whole existence is devoted to maintaining his life as he requires it to be.

As a method actor Day Lewis apprenticed himself to the costume director of the New York City Ballet, studied drawing, hand sewing and draping and made 100 buttonholes and a Balenciaga sheath dress from scratch as a preparation for the role.  This is not a film about Balenciaga though, but about relationships. Into the duality of Reynolds and Cyril comes Alma, a young girl he encounters as a waitress in a tea shop.  He brings her back to his life and house, where Cyril expects her tenure, like all the previous girls to be short, but Alma intends to create a relationship of her own with Reynolds and the film describes in precise but intensely visual terms how this plays out.

Besides the almost tangible sense of fabric, the film is also carried by the music of Jonny Greenwood, who was asked by Anderson to create a primarily romantic English soundtrack punctuated by the occasional sinister notes to represent the relationships on screen.

Peter Bradshaw described Phantom Thread as “a poisoned rose of a movie, inviting you to prick your finger on its thorns and succumb to its weird dark magic.  The Phantom Thread is also a ghostly yarn that would haunt Victorian seamstresses, their exhausted fingers compulsively repeating sewing motions long after their work is done”. Woodcock’s thread messages to his mother are the recognition that she taught him his trade and at 16 he created a wedding dress for her.  The film is “a sublimely eerie and immaculately constructed web”.

A further example of Day Lewis’s attention to detail is the use of the Christian name
Reynolds which is an homage to Reynold Stone, the English wood engraver, typographer and illustrator who was a family friend and whose typography appears on a wall in the London house.

Day Lewis has said that this was his last film. Like many of his others it gained multiple nominations and awards for Academy Awards, Golden Globes and BATFAS.

Selected UK reviews:

The Observer (Mark Kermode)
CineVue (Maximilan Von Thun)
Daily Mail (Brian Viner)

We always welcome audience comments on the films we have shown, please add your comments to the blog below: