“Baby, you are gonna miss that plane” is the most romantic thing anyone’s said in an American movie this century. In a few posts we’ll get to the line which I find the tenderest of any spoken in this category. “Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick” is the most erotic. Is it a form of eroticism that I’m trying to discover in my personal life? Absolutely not, and I don’t want anyone else to discover it for me by giving me a light case of poisoning. But it’s erotic nonetheless, erotic in a way that Fifty Shades of Grey pretends to be. Fifty Shades could only be sexy for a contract lawyer who gets hot and bothered about the minutiae of what Ana signs up for and doesn’t sign up for. Phantom Thread makes its statement of consent here, and does it with elegance that suits the two parties who are, for reasons which are their own, consenting to some barfing and days in bed.

This is the story of an excessively proud man allowing himself to be made weak and dependent because he wants to be those things for his wife. It’s not a business decision, or some statement of household economy where he gives in. It is, to put it in a much funnier way, not about accepting that there will be nights where the asparagus is cooked in butter. Reynolds wins Alma without exerting himself. She must alter herself to fit into his life once she decides that she belongs there. Alma, in turns, exhausted with bending, wins Reynolds by an act of physical conquest. The erotic stems from Reynolds recognizing that he wants to be overpowered.

After my first watch, I thought this direction the plot took was too extraordinary to be credited as competent. Combined with some sequences after the wedding that I still find fairly pat involving Lesley Manville—I adore Manville, who doesn’t, but the script has very little idea what to do with her and it shows—I was not in the mood to accept the pretty wild turn that Alma takes to set her marriage straight. I misread the direction that Phantom Thread was taking, and it took a second viewing for me to see that direction. “I want you flat on your back” is, toxic mushrooms or not, so much more the path that Phantom Thread walks down than what I assumed was petty revenge. It’s the prepositional phrase and the infinitive phrase that follow shortly after which make all the difference: “with only me to help.”