Guardian - 21 January 2018, 12:00 (+ 2289 days 11 hours and 5 minutes) Movies & TV
The rising star began filming opposite her triple-Oscar-winning co-star having only met him once. It was, she says, as intense as it looksWhen Vicky Krieps falls in love with Daniel Day-Lewis on screen, it is a moment that seems unrehearsed in its intensity – and that’s because it was. Day-Lewis insisted that Krieps, a barely known actor from Luxembourg, meet him for the first time in character in Paul Thomas Anderson’s breathtaking new film Phantom Thread. Preparing his role as Reynolds Woodcock, a London couturier, Day-Lewis – with his habitual method-actor zeal – learned to think like Balenciaga, sewed 100 buttonholes and kept Krieps at bay. When Krieps’s Alma walks into the breakfast room of a Yorkshire hotel with sea views, she looks as shy as a Raphael Madonna, but in a waitress’s uniform (the film is set in the 50s). When she asks, in her lilting German accent: “What would you like to order?” Woodcock starts to reel off almost everything on the menu. And Krieps blushes – for Alma and herself. For the audience, there is never any doubt that Woodcock’s appetite – and this is a film about appetite – is not for what is on the menu but for this young woman who will become his muse. Last summer, Day-Lewis announced that the film would be his swansong. For Krieps, it is the most extraordinary beginning.The New York Times critic AO Scott has described Krieps as, in every way, a match for Day-Lewis, an actor at once “canny and unintimidated”. She is a sensation: she brings to the role beauty, vulnerability and a stubborn – potentially defiant – serenity. The film is being hailed as Thomas Anderson’s best (and Magnolia and There Will Be Blood are hardly easy acts to follow). It is at once disturbing and enigmatic, but not without comedy. Continue reading...