The Absolutist Couturier
He played the role of a couturier, fashion
designer Reynolds Woodcock, in the movie
“Phantom Thread,” the story of a man of
fixed habits who’s attracted to a common
waitress with a foreign accent, designing his
dresses for the rich and famous but taken
by the body and looks of the young waitress
whom he invites for dinner and makes her
his model and muse (he likes her little belly);
but their relationship becomes complicated,
his pattern of habits confronting her natural
way, creating the dynamic tension of the story
as expected, because habits cannot coexist
with the natural and spontaneous which bred
the toxic factor that brought him down when
she made him ill with a poison mushroom
powder in his ritual morning tea to get closer
to him, and in his helplessness the walls of
his pattern of habits broke down and let the
innocent young waitress into his private life;
and the absolutist couturier fell in love with
the beauty of living free, and he asked her to
marry him. But the old pattern of habits came
back to haunt him, and he wanted his wife out
of his life so he could get on with his old habits
of fashion designing, and seeing how threatened
she was by his old habits, his wife poisoned
him once more with a mushroom omelette that
broke down the walls of his habits and let her
back into his private life; and he fell in love
with his muse once more, defining the endless
process of thriving to survive in one’s habits
with the freedom of dying, just as the Spanish
poet and Nobel laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez,
no less a complete perfectionist than the absolutist
couturier, who wrote, “I am not I. I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see.” And
when the movie ended, Daniel Day-Lewis, who
played the role of the absolutist couturier, retired
from acting to live his own life because he
could no longer be anyone but himself.
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