“Phantom Thread” Is the Best Food Movie in Ages

02/02/2018 - When Reynolds Woodcock, the protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” first meets Alma, the woman who will disrupt and transform his life, she is waiting on him in the dining room of an English country hotel.

He flirts with her by ordering an elaborate multipart breakfast, a litany of meats and scones and condiments and, as an afterthought, a helping of sausages. The punch line comes once Alma has written all this down, when Reynolds tears the page out of her notebook, pockets it, and demands that she deliver his order by memory. The gesture seems, at first, like a sly act of emotional dominance. But Alma is one step ahead of Reynolds. After she executes his order flawlessly, and he asks her to dinner, she hands him a note already written: “To the hungry boy,” it reads. It’s a flirtatious, disarming way of addressing a man decades her senior. It’s also a mother’s phrase, a promise of care.

Woodcock, played by Daniel Day-Lewis in what he has described as his final performance, is a brilliant, obsessive fashion designer, a couturier who outfits Belgian princesses and English heiresses from his atelier in an elegant London town house, where he lives a life constructed entirely around facilitating the creative clarity that enables his work. The movie—which was nominated for six Oscars on Tuesday—is a portrait of the life of an artist, and Anderson’s lens captures sumptuous images of the designer and his staff at work: cutting luxurious fabric, smoothing perfect seams, tweaking structured collars. But when it comes to the dramatic core of the film, the romantic struggle of Reynolds and Alma (played by Vicky Krieps), “Phantom Thread” isn’t a movie about fashion any more than “American Psycho” is a movie about banking. It is, instead, one of the great food movies in recent memory.

Even before that breakfast where Reynolds first meets Alma, we learn that the exacting, impatient designer is used to exercising his will on the people around him through food. He asserts dictatorial command over the breakfast table, raging at “gloppy” pastries, delighting in porridge and cream, impressing upon both Alma and his previous lover the need to butter and chew one’s toast without making crunching sounds. (Anderson’s sound designer, Christopher Scarabosio, went to great lengths to make toast sound irritating.) He takes pleasure in ordering for others at restaurants, whether a custard dessert for Alma at their first dinner together or a steak tartare for his sister and business partner, Cyril—“my little carnivore,” he calls her, with affection and a hint of menace. In a brief scene early in the film, Reynolds’s cook offhandedly tells Alma that her employer hates his mushrooms cooked in anything more than a whisper of butter. It’s yet another illustration of the suffocating precision of his desires, which Alma, if she wants to be with Reynolds, must learn to accommodate.

Alternatively, as we come to learn, she can lay siege to them. In the annals of culinary fiction, food is often a straightforward metaphor for love, a vehicle for pleasure, comfort, connection, creativity, or fulfillment. (Consider, to take just one recent example, the erotic possibilities of a peach in “Call Me By Your Name.”) What’s less often depicted—but which makes up the very foundation of “Phantom Thread” ’s culinary language—is the kitchen’s ever-present sinister side.

Taking on the responsibility of feeding someone, or affecting the way he feeds himself, can be warfare, a game of power and control. Anderson’s film is about the entwined ways in which people care for and harm one another, the navigation of competing desires and appetites, which all relationships are fuelled by. As a dress designer, Reynolds can effortlessly take charge of Alma’s body. “It is my job to give them to you,” Reynolds tells her, early in the film, when she is being measured for a gown and apologizes for her small breasts. And he pauses, ominously: “If I choose to.” But, in the realm of food, Alma sees a chance to seize the advantage.
The explosive turning point in their difficult romance takes place at the dinner table. Alma has elbowed her way into cooking Reynolds a special meal for his birthday—he does not like surprises, Cyril tries to warn her, but she is undeterred. At that dinner, the candlelit dining room already tense with Reynolds’s displeasure, Alma delivers a retaliation, a way of asserting her authority in the only avenue available to her: she serves him asparagus with a pool of melted butter, as she likes it, rather than with oil, as he prefers.

He showers it almost violently with salt, picks up a spear, drags it with intense deliberation through the butter, and sullenly takes a bite. When Alma looks to him for reassurance, he fiercely diminishes her. “What happened to make you behave like this?” he asks. “Is it because you think I don’t need you?” Yes, she says, and in a gossamer voice he replies, “I don’t.”
Alma’s voice-over fills the film, low and hypnotic with her steady love and determination. After the disastrous dinner, she explains that if Reynolds’s life leaves her no room to deliver care, even in matters so simple as asparagus with butter instead of oil, she simply needs to put him in a position where he’s unable to refuse it. The most beautiful, most lush culinary scene in “Phantom Thread” is also the culmination of this power struggle.

It comes at the very end of the movie (vague spoilers ahead), when Alma makes Reynolds a mushroom omelette in the kitchen of their country home. The scene is shot with an almost animalistic intimacy, a play of closeup textures: the contrast between the slick metal of the knife and the dry fibre of mushrooms; the glossy, blanketing tumble of finely chopped chives. And butter! Not once but twice, one dense yellow knob for browning the mushrooms, and then another to grease the pan, the curds billowing up as the beaten eggs come into contact with the heat.

There is a more urgent act of submission at play when Reynolds agrees to eat this buttery creation, but it would be giving away too much to describe it in full. Suffice it to say that there are many great stories of poisoning, of course, and even of poisoning done out of love, but it is rare (I cannot for the life of me think of another example) for the act to be evidently consensual; so beautifully, sensually wrought; or so intensely stimulating in the viewer of a desire to go home and make a mushroom omelette of her own.

By Helen Rosner

Fonte:https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/phantom-thread-is-the-best-food-movie-in-ages?mbid=nl_Sunday%20Longreads%20(6)&CNDID=40082978&spMailingID=13050215&spUserID=MTMzMTg0NzA2NjUzS0&spJobID=1360359799&spReportId=MTM2MDM1OTc5OQS2

LEGGI GLI ALTRI BLOG

• < Prec
• Succ >