Phantom Thread - The Gestures Of A God, The Devotion Of A Rite

Maybe it’s right to start this analysis driven by the will to clear the field by present and future misunderstandings.

Phantom Thread it’s maybe one of the five most visually stunning movies of 2017 and, perhaps, it is one of the most powerful formal and aesthetic synthesis ever conceived within the Seventh Art. The image organized on the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson is elegant, polished, bright, an elegance and a refinement that characterize every aspect of the movie. The point, however, it’s to understand the true nature of a movie like this.

The risk is to consider Phantom Thread a formalist movie, both in his visual elements (where all the focus is set on the attention to every aspect of the mise-en-scene) and in his thematic texture (considering those references to Hitchcock movies like withdrawals from the director’s style, exactly like it has already happened with the noir and with the cinema of John Houston and Robert Altman in Inherent Vice, postmodern ideas without substance, without something to tell us).

The risk is to consider Phantom Thread like a movie that is a direct consequence of the times in which it comes out: a stylized reflection made by Anderson on a film genre, sustained by the re-use of elements taken from a previous auteur (Hitchcock in this case) and reshaped by another undboubtly strong authorial figure (Anderson).

Phantom Thread it’s certainly this. It’s a reflection on every aspect of love: the affection, the protection, the sexual element, the obsession, the control. The love is mostly seen in a non-rethorical way, a feeling that can’t be separated from the dark side of life, from that REAL dimension, that in movies is only rarely investigated, precisely because it is often inconvenient, even harmful for the narration.

Phantom Thread it’s all this but stopping at this interpretation would mean to stop a path, a research, in the texture of the movie which, paradoxically, would only be at the beginning.

Phantom Thread it’s a prismatic movie. A film in which the elements listed so far (the formal elegance, the reflection on love, the Hitchcock references) work alone but they end up organizing an even more complex and ambitious discourse when you change prospective and you start putting them in communication with each other. Phantom Thread  it’s a great movie, but it becomes epochal if you are willing to change perspective.

Let’s start from the role of the director within this mechanism. From the first moments it’s clear that Paul Thomas Anderson chooses to adopt a peculiar gaze through which he observes the story between Reynolds and Alma.

It’s not only distance or desire not to invade the intimacy between the two character with an excessive formal stylization, it’s some sort of reverential fear towards what (better, who, as will be understood shortly) he is observing.

Once we understand this, it is equally possible, therefore, that that same elegance, that purity, that brightness, that delicacy around which it is structured the movie are simply no more empty elements, which offer themeselves to our gaze but materials that cannot do anything but talk to us.

What are they saying to us? Long story short, every single formal element of the film seems to serve the creation of a devotional, almost sacred, pure, virginal space, as if the whole movie were at the same time a temple and a celebration of "something" that takes shape during its development.

We can say that the whole movie wants to be a celebration of the artistic and creative process.  Reynolds is a God, the creative act is the highest gesture that he can grant to us, ordinary mortals. The fabric is a kind of sacred material that only he or individuals authorized by him can use. Reynolds touches and works the fabric with gestures that recall those of an evocation, of a sacred ceremony that is renewed every time he sews a dress but above all emerges an idea of dignity, of election, connected to the dress and its use (Reynolds gives his dresses only to those who are worthy, as happens with miracles and apparitions and he punishes those who, according to him, has no respect for what he creates).

The feeling is that every action, every word, every breath of Reynolds refers at the same time to this world and to a metaphysical dimension, a "beyond", a distant world.

So here is that the film comes to configure itself as a kind of sacred space aimed at celebrating art and creativity in all their forms; every single element of the movie takes on a new depth if read through this new particular “lens” placed between the religious plan and the anthropological plan.

Reynolds Woodcock is a god, the Woodcock House is his temple, Paul Thomas Anderson is some sort of priest who, with absolute devotion, follows his actions, his gestures, without ever interrupting the flow of events, without ever intruding, and, at the same time placing itself as the guarantor of the film's message and as a mediator between the film, its meanings and the audience.

Illuminated by this new light, the relationship established between Alma and Reynolds assumes an entirely new importance.

A necessary passage within the path of anthropological maturation of a deity it’s its death and resurrection.

The Christ immediately comes to mind, all right, but from a syncretic point of view the death and resurrection of Jesus is nothing but the presentation, under other garments, of a thematic idea that occurs in Osiris but also in the Greek God Dionysus.

Let’s think for a moment about the phenomenon of σπαραγμός (“Sparagmos”), a practice that can be traced back to Dionysus. In a moment of its history, Dionysus is in fact killed, torn to pieces and soon after reassembled from his remains, gathered by his faithful.

Returned intact, the God, after suffering, then rediscovers all his strength and all his vitality. To celebrate the death and resurrection of Dionysus, periodically, the Greeks indicated sacrificial ceremonies, within the Dionysiacs (the feasts dedicated to God), in which they recalled the event.

Inside the rite, the Maenads, priestesses inebriated by the power of God chased the victim of the sacrifice, killed her, cut her into pieces and ate the meat. It is a cycle, a cycle in which life joins death and in which death returns to life through a violent process.

This process is, with very few differences, an echo of what happens in Anderson's film with Alma, at once thoughtful Vestal, to another aggressive Maenad who periodically "kills", poisoning him, his God, and immediately afterwards he takes care of him to make him come back to life through love and devotion.

The calm, the security, with which Reynolds accepts this condition of obscure cyclicality, having almost the certainty that the only way to be what it is consists in passing through death, even if only simulated, is quite emblematic in this sense.

Phantom Thread, then, is an extraordinary film not only for the quantity of readings it offers to the eye of those who agree to scratch its surface but above all because, through it, Anderson simply implements one of the most ambitious attempts to combine art and life.