IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB () review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (G. Kenny) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review
Phantom Thread [2017] (written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) though set presumably in the post-WW II late-1940s to early-1950s seems almost an allegory for our own times. Indeed one _could_ imagine the film to be a strange (and strangely _sad_) retelling of the (one would have hoped _dated_) 18th Century "comedy" She Stoops to Conquer.
At center of the story is Reynolds Woodcock (played quite magnificently if irritatingly by Daniel Day-Lewis) an odd / repressed dress-designer to the English upper-crust of the time. Perhaps today he would be out as gay, perhaps he'd simply remain "odd" (but rich / connected enough to be "accepted" as "odd"). Perhaps because he was gay (and, it being the late 1940s-1950s in Britain it was actually still illegal (!) to be gay), he _takes_ a vaguely East European (perhaps Jewish perhaps "merely Slavic") waitress (Alma, played again quite wonderfully by Vicky Krieps) he meets at a cliff-side restaurant near Dover as certainly his "muse" and perhaps as someone who'd appear around him enough to make it plausible that she'd be his lover.
Wonderful. A _certainly strange_ and possibly gay Anglo stringing along, no, practically _owning_ a young Slavic woman (she _should be so happy_ ...) seems almost an image of ... WELL GUESS ;-/.
The movie would be simply awful if good ole Alma was completely defenseless. Instead, she "finds a way..." to make this seemingly dismally unequal relationship "work".
Sigh ... I hope this cultural nightmare that we're passing through (again...) will come to an end soon.
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