PHANTOM THREAD

Where to begin with this strange slippery film?  It's genre, tone, dramatic tensions shift and evolve over its two hour running time until it becomes something quite hard to pin down? Is it a melodramatic period romance like THE BEGUILED? A Hitchcockian psychological thriller?  A generational ghost story? A fetishistic romance like THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY?  It's a film that certainly delights and repays the audience with a knowledge of film history. And yet it's something quite hermetically sealed and delicately balanced between difference style of film-making.  It's a film one can imagine quite hard to pull off without an absolute conviction in what one was creating. But in its exploration of intense emotional relationships in a tightly proscribed world, it reminded me most of all of Peter Strickland's dreamy romance.

Daniel Day-Lewis (LINCOLN), in his final role, plays Reynolds Woodcock, a 1950s fashion designer who lives and works in a grand London house, complete with royal clientele. As the film opens, he is presented as the kind of domineering, egomaniacal man surrounded by sycophantic enablers that has become vilified in the #metoo movement. He lives by strict rules all designed to give him, the self-appointed genius creator the peace he needs to create. He fears discombobulation.  And in a sense there's a delicious irony in the fact that the first of his dresses that we see is comically ugly - it's the fawning delight of his clientele  - here Gina McKee - that tells us all we need to know.

Reynolds' perfect world is curated by his devoted sister Cyril (Lesley Manville - veteran of Ken Loach films). She neatly dismisses the young girls he takes as his muses when they become tiresome, and manages the financial side of the business.  As the film opens we see her dispatch one girl only for him to speed to the country and pick up another, mostly on the grounds that she looks biddable and can remember his vast breakfast order. Both women seem at his service.  The young Alma (Vicky Krieps), takes orders from him, becomes little more than an inanimate model, and hangs on his every word.  And so the relationship might follow the typical pattern.  Alma - scraping her butter onto her toast so very loudly - might soon be dismissed.

The beauty of this story is that it subverts our expectations of who is truly in control and indeed who are the true protagonists of the film. This is the way in which it most profoundly reminded me of THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY. One thinks this is going to be a film about subservient women but actually they are firmly in control. As the film progresses we see that Cyril very much rules Reynolds - forcing him to attend a wedding to keep the House in business - daring him to pick an argument that he cannot win.  Even the seamstresses are more in control than Reynolds - he is dependent on them to bring his designs to life.  

And so the principal tension of the film is not really between Reynolds and Alma - as we shall see later - he is only feigning resistance to her. It's actually between Alma and Cyril.  The young girl knows her mind and politely but firmly brooks no objections to her plans.  She is vying with the Cyril to take control of Reynolds, and by a masterful piece of skulduggery, wins. The question is how Reynolds will take to this change in reign, and it leads to a superlative set piece at the end of the movie, where very little is said, but suspicions are noted, and accepted.  It's quite the marvel. 

The result is a film with very clear themes if subtly slippery means of getting there. Reynolds misses his dead mother terribly to the point of almost willing her ghost into existence. He craves a replacement - first Cyril and then Alma.  He is forever ravenously hungry for nourishment, and at the most basic level, Alma provides it, naming him in their opening meeting "hungry boy".  What she gets out of the relationship is the ability to express her side of the fetish.  It is no coincidence that the most passionate kiss between the two that we are allowed to see in this very coy and ambiguous film comes when the sado-masochistic relationship is finally acknowledged on both sides. 

Everything about this production is first class - from the costumes, to the interior design, to the evocation of the British sea-side and 1950s ballrooms. The acting is also superb. Daniel Day-Lewis may be getting the awards, but Manville and Krieps match him turn by turn with performances of such subtlety and brilliance. The script is also fascinating, and funnier than one often expects from Anderson. Genuinely brilliantly funny.  There was only one scene that struck a bum note - when Reynolds and Alma look through a client's deep distress and mock and punish her for her drunken escape.  This was cruel - meant to be cruel - but lessened my interest in the characters. And this is ultimately my only real criticism of the film.  All of Anderson, and his cast and crews talents, on such a self-involved, and ultimately slight story. There's something a little disappointing in that - something small - lesser than THERE WILL BE BLOOD and THE MASTER. 

PHANTOM THREAD has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language. The film was released last year in the USA and earlier this year in Canada. It goes on release this weekend in Singapore, Australia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, the UK and Ireland, It goes on release on February 14th in France, Denmark and Russia; on February 22nd in Brazil, Italy, Malaysia, Finland, Portugal, Sweden, Taiwan and Vietnam; on March 1st in Netherlands; on March 8th in Hong Kong and Estonia; on March 15th in Argentina; on April 13th in Norway and Turkey and on May 26th in Japan.

Random DVD round up 2: PERSUASION (2007)

Anne Elliot is a well-born woman who is persuaded not to marry her poor lover Frederick Wentworth. Years later he returns from the Napoleonic wars a rich and eligible match, while her own family has frittered away its fortune and moved to Bath. Anne feels sure that Wentworth will not forgive her and is pained by his new attachment to her young cousin. Meanwhile, Wentworth is still drawn to Anne despite his broken heart and her vain, proud, disdainful family....

I am a great fan of Jane Austen, and of Persuasion in particular. I prefer the modulated tone of the novel and the idea that a heroine can make a profound mistake and suffer, not for a short while, but for many years. Austen goes beyond witty portraits of weak-minded people to show just what profound harm can come of well-meaning prejudice. In earlier novels, Austen mocks society but never questions the fundamental rules by which it operates. In PERSUASION, she shows us an older heroine who knows her mind, is more pro-active, and resolves upon an action against society's guidance.

Simon Burke's adaptation of the novel is disappointing. I have no objection to curtailing the action to 90 minutes - it is, in fact, a rather simple story - but he could easily have done without some scenes and characters and gone for a distilled rather than rushed feel. (Why, for instance, did he not dispense with Mrs Smith and Nurse Rook - especially when he has communicated the essence of the side plot already through Anne and Lady Russell's prescient suspicions?) I also think that Burke's alterations to the script are unsuccessful. In particular, Wentworth resolves to propose before he even arrives in Bath, substantially reducing the dramatic effect of the concert scene and the letter-writing.

Adrian Shergold's direction is also misguided. He wants the movie to appear modern and immediate and so opts for hand-held cameras and straight-to-the-camera glances. Yet this is undermined by his over-lit, sterile sets and the actors' stilted line-readings. Anthony Head and Julia Davis have no idea how to read Austen's lines - and their attempts at comedy have all the subtlety of pantomime. Amanda Hale puts on a ghastly accent as Maria Musgrove, Tobias Menzies camps it up with an over-elaborate drawl, and most of the rest of the cast are largely forgettable. True, Sally Hawkins and Rupert Penry-Jones show real emotional depth as Anne and Frederick, but they are rather swamped by the surrounding mediocrity, I'm afraid.

CONFETTI - Truly a Wasted Talent Production

CONFETTI smacks of a shameless cash-in on the back of the recent success of TV mockumentaries such as The Office and Nighty Night, and the more long-lived hackneyed schmaltz purveyed by Richard Curtis. This mish-mash of genres should be clear from the following short description of the "concept" of the film: a fictional British wedding magazine called Confetti is running a competition for its readers. Three short-listed couples are competing to stage the most original weddings they can imagine, followed by the film-crew that is producing this film. We get to see the run-up to the wedding day, the three weddings themselves and the aftermath of the contest.

Where the movie gets it right is in showing the hoop-la that surrounds a big wedding, and the way in which a couple can be forced into doing all sorts of stuff that they don't want to do. And, thanks to the lovely acting, especially from Martin Freeman and Stephen Mangan, I did find myself rooting for all the couples and being strangely moved by the wedding ceremonies themselves. In other words, the Richard Curtiss fans probably won't be too disappointed.

However, if CONFETTI succeeds in being "sweet" it fails in its mission to make us laugh. The main problem is that the improvised script is distinctly short on laughs - whether subtle and observational or just plain slapstick. It is not hard to see where the film-makers have gone wrong. Why oh why dispense with a scriptwriter? Just because an actor can act well does not mean he can write his own material too. Ricky Gervais and Larry David are the exceptions, not the rule.

Another big fat problem is that the film completely fails as a mockumentary along the lines of This is Spinal Tap or The Office. These films work because the film-makers successfully create the illusion that they are genuinely photographing something that is actually happening. How do they do this? First, they use only the camera angles and shooting styles that would be available to a documentary crew. In The Office this is done to great effect - we are forever looking through windows, or around corners to catch characters doing things they would rather not see on tape. Most obviously, in the case of The Office, we never follow the characters home, or see them DELIBERATELY reveal a side of themselves that they would choose to keep hidden. The humour derives from the unconscious and unintended revelations of insecurity or arrogance. But in CONFETTI, the film-makers break all these rules again and again. So while we do have the straight-to-camera interviews and the hand-held camera observational shots, we also have a bunch of footage that couldn't possibly have been filmed had this been a real documentary. The most obvious error is including a lot of intimate scenes between various couples in their respective bedrooms. But we also get a lot of straightforwardly filmed shots that should have been shot in a voyeuristic, sneaky manner.

Like I said, CONFETTI may be "sweet" on occasion, but it fails in its central mission to make us laugh. With the benefit of hindsight, the only mild humour is derived from one of the opening credits, which informs us that Confetti is A Wasted Talent Production. Never a truer word said. Indeed, there is a sort of achievement in casting Martin Freeman, Jimmy Carr, Julia Davis and Alison Steadman in a film that DOESN'T make us laugh. However, it is not the kind of achievement you want to spend ten squid on seeing.

CONFETTI is on general release in the UK. It hits Australia with a damp thud on June 22nd 2006, squelches into Germany on September 7th 2006 and finally thumbs its nose at France on October 11th.