Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps) is a provincial waitress
Phantom Thread revels in period details: in heavy couture constructions;
with whom Woodcock develops a fraught relationship.
the crunching texture of silks and velvets; and in Woodcock’s foppishness.
Woodcock, couturier, and he knows what he’s doing. We see in Elson’s face the uncomfortable amusement and confusion as her date smoothly changes from dapper dining companion to meticulous dressmaker. He begins to loop his tape measure (correctly, needless to say) around her body and to call out the inches to his sister, who turns up unexpectedly and notes them down, watching Elson with the polite and calculating expression of a predator eyeing prey. As Woodcock takes her bust measurement, his love interest murmurs “I haven’t got any breasts…” “No, no,” he replies, almost Hannibal Lecter-like. “You’re perfect. It’s my job to give you some. If I choose to.” By the time he brings the tape from the nape of her neck to her chest line, staring directly and dispassionately at her nipple through her thin slip as he calls out the measurement,
she looks ready to run from the room screaming. Finally, the end in sight, she worries that her waist measurement is too large. “Don’t worry,” Cyril says of her distracted brother. “He likes a bit of belly.” It is the word-for-word reassurance once given by a fitter to a client of Cristóbal Balenciaga who was fretting she was fat. “I think, from my point of view, the intricacies and intimacies of that work is fascinating because I knew nothing about it,” Anderson explained to Rolling Stone in December 2017. “Doing things like taking measurements, which is very commonplace and boring for someone immersed in that world, I was enamoured up of it in the way that a child would be enamoured of something. So it became very cinematic to me, that way that someone would design a dress. It was like a Frankenstein’s-monster scene to me.” Anderson again relies on this sense of reality later in the film, in the first aid
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given to a damaged dress when Woodcock falls ill and falls over, taking the just-finished gown down with him. The petites mains carry in tables, set up shop in the grand fitting room and surround the ruined gown on all sides. They take it apart like a car, removing and replacing damaged panels as calmly as expert mechanics, almost surgeon-like in their white coats. There is no drama, not even a raised voice. From the setting up of the trestles at a certain height to the covering of the tabletops in fresh tissue paper, folded under at the corners as neatly as a turned-down sheet, this process and its mundane minutiae are entirely correct and matter of fact; unremarkable within the industry, unknown and frankly dull outside of it. Yet, when seen through the objective and curious vision of such an exacting filmmaker as Anderson and shown with a casual accuracy bordering on the
documentary, these routine and necessary motions take on the air of a formalised ritual. They become as solemnly strange as the setting of an altar before a service or the preparation of a bier before a burial. There is no need to elaborate or invent when you can find such revelation in reality. Equally telling is the expert diagnosis of the damage given by the head of the atelier – who, like the rest of her team, is not played by an actor, but a real seamstress. She lists every stain, tear and hole, and their respective cures, while Reynolds lies in agony in his attic bedroom, entirely forgotten. In this industry – then as now – it seems the clothes are always more important than those who make them. Phantom Thread positively revels in fashion; in the armour-like period correctness of the heavy couture constructions, in the glowing colours
and deep crunching texture of silks and velvets, and in Woodcock’s fastidious foppishness. In one memorable scene he descends to dinner, furious and fabulous in piped lilac pyjamas, a navy-blue paisley cravat, a chunky cardigan and a Savile Row windowpane-check green tweed blazer, earning an appreciative chuckle from my Parisian co-spectators. Yet this film is ultimately not about fashion, despite this being the very warp and weft upon which the story is embroidered. Even in the slow zoom of one of the most pivotal human moments – fashion seemingly forgotten and utterly superfluous – a just-finished wedding dress on a mannequin dominates a third of the frame, a mute, white witness. Rather, the clue is in the title, as revealed by costume designer Bridges in a Deadline interview in January. A reference to an obscure 19th-century superstition, the
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“phantom thread” denotes the invisible ingredient: the colossal human effort it takes to make clothes, “and even when [the seamstresses] weren’t sewing it, their energy was there[…] There was some kind of belief that the seamstress’s energy carries on. Because it was all handwork, so human spirits – human energy – was so intertwined with the garment’s creation.” This film knows that clothes, while fascinating, are not everything; that you have to look at who makes them and who inhabits them to find real drama and real life. The industry should take note. Phantom Thread, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is in cinemas now.