Or is it beautiful but bizarre?
Or is it beautiful because it's bizarre?
Whatever your perspective, you will be enchanted and intrigued by the intricate design of this film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, Boogie Nights) as it unspools and unfurls like a bolt of elegant cloth. The creation that we experience here — both the haute couture dressmaking and the intricate film — is fascinating and sensuous.
It’s an odd combination of silky and silly too.
Granted, there might not be much here that seems relevant at least in our contemporary political and socioeconomic context. 1950s. Post-war London. Wealthy and entitled clientele. Rarefied and arcane craft. Eccentric and cranky taskmaster with his own obsessive-compulsive manipulation of the women in his life. Ah, finally something that resonates with our time and place.
Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is the mastermind of the House of Woodcock, a stylish London atelier that he runs with his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) as they cater to royalty and jet-setters. He sketches his designs by day, dresses, and undresses, his models by night. He meets a waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps) at a hotel restaurant and orders a breakfast of mind-boggling magnitude — Welsh rarebit, poached egg, bacon, scones, butter, cream, jam, pot of tea and finally, sausages. I spelled out his breakfast order here because Day-Lewis is magnificent in his slow, flirty, whimsical, and suggestive requests, each item extending the foreplay. Talk about grooming!
Soon enough he’s offered her a modeling job, just one more woman who has come and gone throughout his life and studio. So his most recent Pygmalion manipulation is underway. The model becomes a muse until the muse becomes an irritant. But the irritant, like a grain of sand in the oyster, becomes a pearl. She seeks to confirm her own power in this rather creepy triangle with the brother and sister, and remarkably her power over him eventually comes in unexpected ways as she tells him, “I want you flat on your back, helpless…tender…open.” How that happens won't be spoiled here.
The heightened, surreal sound is used with great comic effect in the most banal of events as Alma butters and eats toast, stirs tea, taps her cereal spoon against her teeth. For sure, there is a lot of breakfasting in this film and like the breakfast sequence in Citizen Kane, we learn much about the man from his morning meal. As his sister Cyril explains, “If breakfast isn't right, it’s hard for him to recover the rest of the day.” It's a delicious cinematic revelation of conflict between him and Alma as he chastises her with “Too much movement, entirely too much movement at breakfast.”
It's a romance, sort of. It's a dark, dark comedy. It’s a psychological study of obsession and control.
Never have scissors with needles and thread been more erotically photographed. The sound of metal blades with sharpened edges pivoting against one another as they slice through fabric must have been a Foley artist’s dream assignment. And who knew a needle sliding back and forth, trailing its thread from one side of the cloth to the other, pushing through to the other side and then returning, could be so eroticized with the dual pain of penetration and pleasure of release.
So there’s more than a bit of eerie Hitchcock throughout the film as the artist ponders and controls his muse. The male gaze dominates. He is master of all he surveys in his intense, even monomaniacal manipulation of her body— with its merits and demerits — so it can best display his art. The woman’s flesh is a mere mannequin, an articulated doll used by dressmakers and window-dressers to display clothing. But the muse gazes back and finds her own control of the man who made her. Though the film's opening line is “Reynolds has made my dreams come true,” the rest of the film shows such dreams are more like Freudian nightmares.
It’s all rich, stylish fun, but it’s a fun that’s distant, aloof, icy. He is no easy man to live with, for as he says he’s a “confirmed bachelor…incurable…marriage would make me deceitful.” The bringing of tea to his room creates a storm of blistering outrage, not for the unwanted tea, but for the interruption of his concentration and creativity, sure to ruin his entire day. “I cannot begin my day with a confrontation” should become a mantra for us all if we were so fortunate to have every whim catered and every caprice accommodated.
Daniel Day-Lewis says this is his last role. Recently, I have watched again his gay street punk Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), his man with cerebral palsy in My Left Foot (1989), his wiry athleticism in The Last of the Mohicans (1992), his ruthless violence in There Will Be Blood (2007), and his craggy evocation of the title character in Lincoln (2012). There is nothing he cannot do, and this stylish, foppish evocation of a London haute couturier adds to his magisterial accomplishment.
He will be missed.
I had rather hoped he would be the one cast to play your humble reviewer in the film of my life story. Alas that is not to be. Jeremy Irons, calling Jeremy Irons, casting call for Mr. Irons….
This article appears in Feb 1-8, 2018.