Set within the cold elegance of post-war English fashion, the film’s surface suggests order, polish, refinement. But beneath lies sits a fierce dialectic between control and disruption, between genius and care, between the self as sovereign and the self as vulnerable. These dialectics are staged primarily through glances, gestures and silences. The buttering of toast, the cutting of mushrooms - they all serve to heightens its force. Anderson does not sentimentalise love. He anatomises it.

The Haunting Presence of a Mother

It is impossible to understand our protagonist, Reynolds Woodcock, without accounting for the ghost that hovers just outside the frame: his mother. She appears only once, in a fever-dream hallucination while he is ill, but her influence saturates the film. Reynolds speaks of her often - reverently, obsessively. She taught him to sew. He keeps a lock of her hair sewn into the lining of his garments. She is absent, yet she is everywhere.

Reynolds’s compulsive routines are not simply the quirks of genius. They are mourning rituals - an attempt to preserve a vanished maternal order. The women who enter his life are never allowed to replace her, destined instead to orbit the space she once occupied. His relationship to femininity is one of longing and control: he desires the nurturing presence of a mother, but fears the obliteration of self that such care costs. So, he designs women instead. Dresses them. Silences them. Makes them beautiful - and obedient.

But Alma is not obedient.

The Aesthetics of Control

Reynolds is a man whose artistry depends on the absolute regularity of his environment: breakfast must be quiet, his emotions subdued. This routine allow his body and mind to become streamlined for creation. In this way, he is a familiar figure. An archetypal male genius, whose brilliance is underwritten by the invisibilised labour of women. Phantom Thread initially positions itself as an exploration of this dynamic: the artist and his muse, the Holy man and the woman who serves him.

But this narrative is swiftly and subtly undermined. Alma enters Reynolds’s world as a waitress, but becomes his model, his lover, and eventually his wife. She refuses to obey the expected trajectory. She is not obliterated by proximity to greatness. Nor does she seek to soften Reynolds’s edges or humanise his genius. Instead, she insists on a kind of presence that cannot be instrumentalised. Alma laments her arms are “too strong.” As it turns out, her mind is too. And it is precisely this strength - quiet, observing, implacable - that reorients the film’s structure of power.

Desire as Counterforce

There’s something almost uncanny about how familiar Alma’s silence feels. Not passive, not subservient, but active. Strategic. Watching her, one is forced to ponder the times we have remained silent. Not out of fear, but to see more clearly. To hold ground. To assess the shape of the room. Not because we had nothing to say, but because we wanted to know what that power felt like before we responded to it.

Alma is not an antagonist. Nor is she a romantic heroine in the classical sense. What she enacts is something more complex: a reclamation of agency within a relational dynamic that is architecturally imbalanced. She does not demand Reynolds relinquish control. She simply declines to subordinate herself to it. This refusal becomes the fulcrum of their bond, and the source of its unsettling erotics.

Her response to his tyranny is not rebellion, but care weaponised as strategy. She poisons him, not out of malice, but to induce weakness. To force dependency and rupture the illusion of his invulnerability. She reduces him, briefly, to a state of near-infancy: fevered, disoriented, reliant. In doing so, she produces the only condition under which reciprocity becomes possible. And remarkably, the film not only condones this logic, but romanticises it.

What emerges is not a cautionary tale, but a strange and unsettling resolution: Reynolds begins to crave the very vulnerability he once resisted. The omelette he consumes in the film’s final scene - knowingly laced with poison - is not merely a symbol of surrender, but of complicity. He participates in his own disarming. He chooses the condition of being undone.

The Violence of Love

Here lies the film’s most radical proposition: that love is not the gentle erosion of the self, but its deliberate reconfiguration. At times violent, at times humiliating, but always transformative. Love, Phantom Thread suggests, is not the elimination of power, but its redistribution. Not the resolution of difference, but the acceptance of asymmetry.

We tend to associate intimacy with safety. With homecoming, ease, mutuality. But in Phantom Thread, intimacy is danger. It is risk. It is the willingness to wound and to be wounded in return. Not arbitrarily, and not sadistically, but as a means of establishing contact at the most existential level. The film reveals what much of cinema is too polite to name: that the price of real intimacy is sovereignty. That love, if it is to be more than projection, requires the collapse of self-containment.

There’s a reason our language for love is so often tinged with violence. “Falling” in love, “struck” by beauty, “lovesick,” “heartbroken.” But Phantom Thread does not metaphorise. It literalises. The act of poisoning (tenderly, repeatedly) becomes the grammar of Alma’s care. In Reynolds’ vulnerability, Alma finds not power, but access. In his collapse, she finds communion.

This is not abuse. Nor is it mere domination. It is a thesis - admittedly a dangerous one - of mutual disruption. Both participate. Both are remade. This is what makes the film so difficult to reduce to a moral schema. Its intimacy is not rehabilitative. It is transactional, destabilising, and overwhelmingly erotic.

Against Romantic Resolution

The conventional arc of romantic cinema hinges on harmony. The eventual synchronisation of desires, values and lives. Phantom Thread denies us that satisfaction. What it offers instead is something truer, but surely more disquieting: the suggestion that love is not alignment, but entanglement. That the erotic charge of a relationship lies not in how well two people match, but in how thoroughly they disturb one another’s sense of control.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how we all supposdley long to be “understood.” But I think what we really mean, is that we want to be withstood. We hope to be met at the peak of our intensity. Not softened or silenced, but seen, and stayed with. Endured. Phantom Thread makes no apologies for that desire. It does not moralise it. It simply allows it to unfold, in all its mess and sharpness.

There is no triumph here. No character learns a lesson. There is only the ongoing negotiation of power and dependence. A rhythm of resistance and surrender that never quite settles. The final tableau is not of resolution, but of ritual: the woman making the man sick, the man welcoming the sickness, both of them consenting to the roles they have authored for one another. It is tender. It is monstrous. It is LOVE.

Phantom Thread does not ask us to emulate its characters. It asks us to look, unflinchingly, at the private logic of desire. To recognise that intimacy is not always gentle, and that love - real, sustained, so called ‘adult’ love - may demand more than sweetness. It may demand submission. Or strategy. Or the simple, radical act of staying in the room, even as the terms shift beneath your feet.

And if that room happens to smell faintly of mushrooms - so be it.

Two weeks ago, I got a new tattoo. A woman, holding the book, held open on a page. Page 28.

As corny as it sounds, that image lives in me. It holds more than just cinematic beauty; it’s memory, longing, recognition, and grief. I haven't explained it to anyone, but I am relinquishing that secrecy now.

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) was one of the first films I fell in love with. That true, hopeless, Phil Collins, head-over-heels type of love. Because of Australia’s poor film distribution, and because I was a half-closeted sixteen-year-old who didn’t want to be caught watching a lesbian romance, I first saw it wrapped in blankets at 2am on a dodgy Twitter link.

Usually, when I fall hard for a film, I can pinpoint the moment it happens, down to the scene. Betty and Rita in the theatre. Westley and Buttercup tumbling down the hill. Leia watching Han descend into carbonite. But Portrait didn’t hit all at once. It unfolded. And when it was over, I felt like someone entirely new. That cliche of a moviegoer entering the cinema one way and leaving another. Strutting down the street like a freshly divorced Nicole Kidman, riding the high of a new lease on life. It was that feeling, tenfold. The air of a new perspective I couldn’t quite name, whooshing by me from the comfort of my own bedroom, helping to pat dry the tears on my face.

Portrait is the story of a love forsworn. Two women - Marianne and Héloïse - slowly and quietly falling for one another off the coast of France in the 18th century.

In corner one, Héloïse - an aristocrat, whose mother is trying to marry her off to a stranger in Milan. And in corner two, Marianne - an artist, hired to paint Héloïse’s portrait as a gift to this unseen suitor. But Héloïse refuses to pose. She resists the roles she’s being pushed into. So Marianne lies - she pretends to be her walking companion, observing her in secret during their daily strolls.

Marianne’s deception requires her to watch Héloïse with immense focus, to observe every detail, every curve, every flicker of expression. And in that act of attention, desire begins to take root. It’s the richest of setups for a love story.

In cinema, the gaze has always been a tool for expressing desire. In Portrait, it is central. An entire romance told through the act of looking. Marianne watches Héloïse. Héloïse eventually watches her back. The gaze is the key to their love actualising. For queer people, it’s a deeply familiar language.

Before we had safety, before we had freedom, we had the capital-L Look. A glance across a crowded room. A stare held too long. A flicker of mutual understanding in a world that insists you stay hidden. Queer people have always communicated through mutual attention.

I know something of that kind of love - the kind that lives in silence. Built through long looks with touch silently forbidden. I’ve been in rooms with people I probably could have gone on to love, but failed to even let out a word. I’ve memorised the curve of a mouth, the flick of a wrist. Doing it all in the knowledge that I’d never get to do anything more. I still find myself looking, sometimes. Watching someone a little too long. Looking is safer. It’s small, quiet, survivable. And it’s how I’ve learned to love.

You may think there’s poetry in that. Sometimes there is. But mostly, it just bruises. Looking is both the safest and the most revealing thing I know how to do. The longing doesn’t go away - it just finds new ways to live.

Cinema has long relied on the gaze to tell queer stories, even when it wasn’t allowed to name them. As Old Hollywood buried queerness beneath subtext and suggestion, we became masters of performance and concealment in reality. The gaze became both our shield and our sword - survival and confession all at once. I recognise myself in that restraint.

Where Portrait is a study in stillness, in tension and control, Brokeback Mountain (2005) crashes into love like a storm. My relationship to it was equally intense. I avoided the film for years. I already knew what happened to Jack and Ennis. And I already knew how I would react.

I’ve always been captivated by stories of secret romance. On the surface, they feel indulgent. Exciting. A hidden world built for two. But anyone who has ever loved in the shadows knows the truth: secrecy is a cage. What feels thrilling from afar is, in practice, a quiet grief. A constant negotiation between love and danger, between desire and erasure.

That grief haunts Brokeback. Set in America’s rural West in the 1960s, it tells the story of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, two men who fall in love while herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. One cold night, something shifts. A line is crossed. And neither of them has the language nor the bravery to name what’s happened.

Their romance is tender, desperate, and entirely unspoken. Unlike Marianne and Héloïse, who eventually find the words and the space to love - if only briefly - Jack and Ennis never get there. Their desire simmers under half-averted glances and long silences. Their world does not allow them the dignity of visibility.

But the longing is still there. It’s unmistakable. It’s in the way Jack watches Ennis from across the fire. In Ennis’s clenched jaw whenever Jack says something tender. In the rare moments their eyes meet - then dart away. If visibility is power in Portrait, in Brokeback it is risk. Their love is boxed in by shame and fear, and the camera reflects this, often pulling back, keeping its distance. The landscape may be vast, but their world feels impossibly small.

There are moments that live in the watching: Jack staring after Ennis as he walks away, every muscle in his body straining not to call out. Ennis looking through a window, watching Jack leave for the last time. Their reunion kiss, where Ennis looks over his shoulder first, scanning the alley before surrendering to the moment. And then, that quiet, shattering final scene: Ennis holding Jack's shirt close, the two pieces of fabric - one his, one Jack's - pressed together, like bodies that couldn't be. The camera lingers. It watches, like we do, unable to intervene.

The film is full of stolen glances, restrained touches. Jack playfully lassoing Ennis, a cowboy game infused with repressed desire. The fishing trips, where Jack reaches for more than just trout. The scene where Jack suggests they build a life together, and Ennis, terrified of what could happen to men like them, refuses. Ennis’s fear is always watching him, always shaping his actions. He remembers a hate crime from childhood, a man brutally killed for being gay. That memory becomes his cage. Jack looks at him not just with love, but with plea. And Ennis, unable to look back, stays silent.

Even the landscape plays a role in their gaze. The mountain is open, free, untouched by the eyes of others. It becomes the only place they can truly be together. When they descend, they must don their masks again. The mountain sees them. The world doesn’t.

Midway through Portrait, Marianne, Héloïse, and their maid Sophie read the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice aloud. Orpheus descends into the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice. He’s told not to look back at her until they’re both free. But he does, and loses her forever. Marianne and Héloïse debate the meaning.

The common interpretation is that Orpheus, out of mistake or weakness, chooses to look back. But Héloïse offers her own: that Eurydice called for him to turn around, and only because of that did he do so. “He chooses the memory of her,” she says. “He makes the poetic choice.” This myth frames Marianne and Héloïse's love story: one they know cannot last. It is better to end with the memory than nothing at all.

Our lovers find themselves bound to the same fate. As Marianne leaves, Héloïse calls out to her. As she does, Héloïse disappears, and Marianne casts herself the poet, bound to never truly see her lover again.

Despite its devastation, there’s a beauty in Héloïse’s cry. A recognition that love, even if not meant to last, is worth calling out for. It’s in the voicing of her longing that Héloïse, like Orpheus, makes the love real, if only for a fleeting moment. It’s a heartbreaking plea for connection, for the hope that even if their time together is over, their love will echo beyond the boundaries of time and memory. The call itself becomes a part of the portrait they’ve painted of each other - one that is unfinished, imperfect, but undeniably vivid and alive.

In Brokeback Mountain, memory is all Ennis is left with. After Jack’s death, Ennis visits his childhood home. In a modest closet, he finds Jack’s shirt, hung beside one of his own, from their first summer together. He pulls them close, holds them to his face, whispers, “I swear.” It’s his Page 28. A relic. A promise. A love that the world refused to let live.

Both films are about forbidden love. But more than that, they are about the private sanctuaries queer people build inside hostile worlds - brief, fragile spaces where love can exist before reality crashes back in. They show us what it means to be seen, to be wanted, to be known, and how much it costs when that knowing is denied a future.

Watching these films today, I don’t just grieve what the characters lost. I think about what we, as queer people, still fight to hold. The right to love gently. To be vulnerable. To write our own endings. The silence isn’t gone. But we speak louder now.

And still, I carry Héloïse with me. Not just as a character, but as a reminder. A gaze that saw and was seen. A love that bloomed even when it couldn’t stay. That’s what I marked on my skin, the image of her holding the book, looking back. Page 28.

My myth. My memory. My own quiet way of saying: I was here. I loved. I remember.

“I think I wrote it, in a way, to find you.”

It’s an impossible feat, to mourn the loss of something that never really was.

In all honesty, I spend more time pondering the ‘what ifs’ than the ‘what is’. Lost loves, lost moments. Lost chances and hopes. I’ve re-traced those regrets with so much fervour that the memories themselves have started to smudge. Now it’s like looking through glasses dotted with sweaty fingerprints.

I imagine that’s what things have been like for Jesse and Céline throughout the nine-year night that spans between Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

From that first frame, everything seems to glow. Smudged by memory. As if Linklater was pranking his camera op with with thinnest piece of plastic wrap that Paris could provide.

Trying to shake a memory like the night Jesse and Céline shared is the mental equivalent of trying to get some rest on a hot night before a big flight. You know it’s what’s making you stir, but the more you try to shake it, the harder it becomes.

It’s that restless state of anguish that we find Jesse in. He’s nine years older, with worse hair and worse clothes. But the same man. We know immediately - it’s in his eyes.

And he’s done perhaps the worst thing someone can do when they’re in his state. He’s written about it.

I’ve kept a few patchy journals over the years. Scribbled down unfinished thoughts in a Moleskine I pinched from my dad, or dotted down drunken thoughts in my notes app in the Uber ride home. It used to be a means of organisation for me. Write it down and you can file it away. Neglect it. Repress it. But over the recent months, I’ve opted for a process I believe to be healthier.

I’ve started journalling consistently. It’s something I never really thought I could do. I thought I lacked the courage to really face what I’ve been feeling. And I know how ridiculous it may sound, that I find writing my thoughts in a book scary. But once you try it yourself - once you really say it how it is…

So that’s why Jesse does what he does. He doesn’t reveal the full truth. His book - ‘This Time’ - is not a journal, or a rigid documentary account. Rather, he compartmentalises his longing with the helping hand of fiction. It’s like when you make a self-deprecating joke. Coating reality with humour or fiction or the thinnest layer of plastic wrap is all one in the same. It’s creating the tiniest separation from reality.

But we’re all in on the truth. When he tells his audience what happened in the Summer of ‘94, we’re treated to brief vignettes of Before Sunrise, serving as tiny pieces of his memory. A memory I’m sure he’s played and re-played until it’s started to fray.

And then, she appears.

That first shot of Céline is the stuff of dreams. The way she just manifests between reality and memory is enough to will tears. (It, of course, worked wonders on my weary eyes).

It’s serendipity. A moment that he - and I’m sure she - have longed for, for years. A moment re-played and re-thought out. Different scenarios, good, bad and grand. But none of them this.

Despite its suddenness, it’s a moment of quiet. It’s quaint. It’s breaking bread with a childhood friend that’s loved you at your worst.

It’s not a dramatic reunion of hearts with a technicolour hue and a swelling orchestra. It’s better than that. It’s coming home.

We’ve all felt that click before. It exists in the first meeting, the second, the thirtieth and the hundredth. The quiet slotting of something into place. Something you didn’t really know was out of sorts until that moment. Or perhaps you really did know, but you were too scared to admit it.

You can almost hear that click for the first time when our lovers meet eyes for the first time in nine years.

As with the first film, Linklater weaves a tapestry of conversation that is of course natural, but beyond that, ridden with questions of life and love. But converse to its predecessor, there’s a greater bite and rawness to the way they communicate now. If Sunrise is a waltz — playful and romantic — Sunset is tango. They can’t dance around things anymore.

And yet, there’s an initial delicacy to their conversation. Céline teases her romantic discontent. She jokes about her appearance to gauge whether Jesse still finds her attractive. She only finds the courage to raise the marriage question in a moment of lightness. But that delicacy begins to wane when they board the boat, and melts completely when they reach the cab.

And oh, that scene in the cab. It has to be an all-timer.

But let me not rush to it. Let me find out lovers along the Seine. Here, they ditch the fanciful questions of philosophy floated in Sunrise for a much harder conversation - reality.

They exchange pleasantries at first - taking in the Notre Dame cathedral together - before Jesse finally summons the courage he’s been looking for out of thin air. It spills out of his mouth, the first of many confessions. The reason he wrote the book.

You know I think that book, in a way, was building something. So I wouldn’t forget the details of the time that we spent together. You know, like just as a reminder that once we really did meet. That this was real. This happened.

After that, it’s free reign. They begin to trade light confessions of love that they’ve clearly bottled up, waiting to be released before the right audience, the audience they’ve waited years to reconvene.

Céline admits her inability to forget people. Jesse longs for a reality where she did show up. Two symptoms of the inability to ever really move on.

Then Céline drops a line that - embarrassingly - really changed how I think.

I guess when you're young you just believe there'll be many people you connect with. Later in life you realize it only happens a few times.

In my head, human connection is like the feudal system. And Jesse and Céline are sitting with the kings. I think there’s only been two instances where I have neared that place - three if I’m being generous. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise the rarity of those connections until they’d been broken.

It’s that scarcity of a true bond that helps fan the flames of longing in our lovers, and us all. It’s also that rarity that helps all of their emotion spill out in the taxi.

Perhaps it’s because a car is neutral territory, devoid of the charms of Paris or the distractions of passersby. Or, maybe it’s the first time they find themselves truly alone. Either way, the conversation that unfolds somehow manages to be equal parts brutal and romantic.

It would be futile work for me to pull it apart completely. The only way I can articulate how this scene makes me feel is with empty words like ‘wow’ and ‘damn’ and the occasional tear.

Two things here — the first, Céline’s lament about her former partners finding marriage after her. A fear and / or reality for so many women, and the summation of why myself and so many others find her so sympathetic.

And the second, Jesse’s dream. An admission of guilt, emotional cheating. A naked Céline in his bed. His wife across the room. Caverns of distance sit between both women, of varying lengths, both equally impossible to broach.

“And then I have this other dream, where you're pregnant, in bed beside me, naked, and I want so badly to touch you, but you tell me not to and then you look away and I touch you anyway, right on your ankle and your skin is so soft and I wake up in sobs, alright? And my wife is sitting there looking at me, and I feel like I'm a million miles from her, and I know that there's something...wrong!”

It all comes back to that goddamn hand hover, the one Céline echoes shortly after. The endless longing to reach out and touch, but the undeniable knowledge that to touch would be futile. At least now.

As painful as all of this is, the admissions help our lovers finally cross that invisible threshold.

When they reach Céline’s apartment, something new washes over them. Silence. As they ascend the staircase together, exchanging stolen glances reminiscent of Sunrise, there’s almost nothing left to be said. Almost, I say, as there’s one confession left. Céline’s counterpart to Jesse’s book - her song.

With his book, Jesse has been vulnerable from the movie’s jump. But Céline has been more restrained. That’s made obvious with her feigning memory loss over them being intimate in ‘94 (which eventually later confesses to faking — “We had sex twice, you idiot!”).

But once they reach her home, the place where she’s truly comfortable, she’s willing to finally confront what exists between herself and Jesse. With A Waltz for a Night, we get a glimpse of the Céline of days gone by. Her face softens, and she’s smiling wide. It’s reminiscent of the optimism she held in Sunrise. And emblematic of how Jesse has enabled this lightness to return.

These two pieces of art that book end the narrative are, what I believe, allow Jesse and Céline to finally find their ways back to one another. They’re used to conversations - ping-ponging ideas around. But with his book, and her song, they’re forced to be brave. To go solo.

Reality isn’t as romantic. You can’t just pour love into writing and pray it will bring them back. But perhaps the difference here is the courage to share those thoughts. Whether in the form or art or not. To be vulnerable, however painful, comes at far less a cost, than to sink into your longing in silence. To leave that memory unfinished.

Which leads us to our ending.

Throughout the film, just like its predecessor, there exists the burden of time. It haunts both narratives in similar ways. In Sunrise, they’re confined to a day. They know that when the sun rears its head, they will be forced to leave one another. In Sunset, they’re afforded even less. A handful of hours until the sun will begin to set, and Jesse must make his journey home.

Despite being greater optimists in Sunrise, Jesse and Céline never once try to force the hand of time. They fall to its will.

But here, that burden becomes lighter with each passing moment. Now, the couple won’t find themselves at its mercy — Jesse especially.

They’ve spent too long aching, writing, imagining and re-imagining, that to heed to time’s cruelty once more would be simply idiotic.

Perhaps this attitude is something that only second chance romances inspire. With the exception of the world’s most cynical existentialists, time isn’t something that is always perennial. There’s only a handful of, admittedly devastating, events that force us to confront time - when lovers are lost, family members pass, jobs are lost or dreams are left incomplete.

Despite the cruelty of those events, there’s an equal sweetness to them. With their brutality, they bring the gift vulnerability. The realisation that life is just too short to dodge honesty. Both honesty with others, but more importantly, with ourselves.

“Is it better to speak or to die?” Before Sunset helps us side with the latter.

It’s in those emotions that we reach the film’s ending, perfectly soundtracked to Nina Simone’s cover of a Sinatra standard — Just In Time.

After being at time’s mercy in ‘94, Jesse and Céline meet again. Just in Time. Just as Jesse longs for real companionship, and Céline longs for real love.

And then, the pair’s final rejection of time’s brutal call.

“Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.”

“I know.”