Phantom Thread (2017) Directed by Paul Thomas AndersonPaul Thomas Anderson has never no
Phantom Thread (2017) Directed by Paul Thomas AndersonPaul Thomas Anderson has never not placed directly on the screen all the evidence we need to understand what his pictures are about. (That’s apart from his movie being about his movies, in the same way that a Wallace Stevens poem is so often about the poem itself.) However, viewers of Anderson’s work are obligated to know some history. For example, an awareness of how the early self-help, personal improvement cults were marketed to GIs returning from the WWII is essential for complete immersion in The Master. The ads in Popular Mechanics, circa 1949, are practically a program guide.For Phantom Thread, a cursory glance at mid-century haute couture, specifically as captured by Norman Parkinson for Vogue at its peak, is all that’s required. Norman Parkinson’s then-famous shots of models Dovima or Lisa Fonssagrives were unmitigated fantasies, even as the subjects and their attire functioned as same. (Better still, see Cecil Beaton’s photos of designer Charles James, on whom Daniel Day-Lewis’ character is based.)The crucial matter is that Anderson lets us briefly witness the worldly affairs of the otherworldly, and it all looks like those fantastic Vogue photos of yore. This is an intimate glimpse of how members of an exclusive couture society did not merely enjoy a life of privilege, but moved through a stunning kind of day-to-day fantasy. Anderson knows that if we look long enough, eventually the darker, more perverse elements of this existence will emerge as the primary ones. After all, it’s a rare Grimms’ fairy tale that is not, at heart, a grim fairy tale. -- source link
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