DRY DOWN #16: BEST PICTURE EDITION (and a new home)
HELLO SWEET DRY DOWNERS,
Welcome back, welcome to 2018, welcome to Oscars weekend! We know we have been away since December, and we have missed you! Both Rachel and Helena have been (and still are) hard at work on big projects that have kept us away from writing this letter for you as often as we might like, but we wanted to come back to continue our annual Oscars tradition of matching perfumes to the best picture nominees (because you know you were wondering which fragrance smells like silently falling in love with a fishman…). So, below, find our pairings! (PS: we tried to send this out early Sunday afternoon; Tinyletter flagged our account and held it from sending, then hours later randomly sent it to about 1/4th of you late that night. So, if you are getting this twice, we apologize! One of the reasons we are moving to a new home is to prevent these issues in the future).
Also, hello from Substack! You may have noticed that you’re receiving this letter from a different (non-tinyletter) address than usual. We've decided to move The Dry Down to a paid subscription model here on Substack - this letter is free to everybody, but after this one, the majority of updates will be subscription-based (although we will still send a free letter here and there!). We love writing these, and love talking to you perfume, but doing so for free isn't really possible for either of us anymore. Moving to subscription allows us to keep sending these to you, and will help us to build out this community we have been so grateful to see form around perfume and words and memories (this service will also allow us to provide a home for our full letter archive). You can subscribe through this email, and we’ll be sending another reminder in the next few days, but rest assured there will still be plenty of ways to access The Dry Down for free as well.
AND THE NOMINEES ARE...
LADY BIRD -- RS
My favorite news story of this entire awards season, a story that isn’t really a news story at all but more of a tender tabloid anecdote, is the fact that Greta Gerwig had to write Dave Matthews a cold fan letter asking him if she could put “Crash Into Me” in her directing debut. She was up against the ropes when she did it; she had already written the song into the script. An entire scene hinges on the fact that Lady Bird has her yearning highschool heart absolutely trampled upon by a doofus highschool boy, and so calls her best friend Julie for an emergency catharsis session that involves holding hands in the front seat of a beater car, crying to a pop song. Gerwig was convinced that the pop song had to be this pop song, that no other track would do. Because “Crash Into Me” is the purest distillation of what it felt like to be young and malleable in 2003, when people still carried flip phones and wore those low-slung jeans that laced up the crotch, when The O.C debuted and everyone was, for a brief shining moment, invested in the well-being of a wayward boy from Chino who wore a leather cuff and was in love with the rich girl next door. 2003 was moments before the Internet exploded, but it feels like eons ago; we didn’t yet know how to tamper our Big Moods with layers of digital distance, how to transform our crises into content. The best and most poignant thing about the use of this song is that it is from 1996; "Crash Into Me" was already passé when Lady Bird got to it, it was already played out and parodied. But then, this is why it works. Teenagers always find creative ways to self-remedy, and often they involve maudlin music. When I was in high school, I burned entire CD mixes that served the sole purpose of inducing meltdowns; I had my crumpleface soundtrack always at the ready in the visor holder of my Volvo station-wagon (PS: I was just a year or so ahead of Lady Bird, and so feel almost too roasted by this film to ever see it with objective eyes. Like, I too auditioned for the school musical with an off-key solo from a Sondheim musical -- it was Company, not Merrily, but how dare Greta Gerwig read my diary, you know?). So I get why Gerwig had her heart so set on DMB, because there is no devotion as steadfast as a teenager’s devotion to schmaltz.
Gerwig’s note to Matthews, which begins, “I love your music,” is about the least chill letter that anyone has ever written to anyone else, and so of course after I read it I immediately identified with her in a way that felt dorky and total and gnawing, like maybe I had written this note through her, like maybe we all had. “I think when you are a teenager,” she wrote, to this man, whose CD was the first she ever bought, “music is the way you try to imagine the future. ‘Life’ always seems like it’s happening somewhere else, and definitely not to you, and so, through art, you try to connect to that bigger world. ‘Crash Into Me’ is the most romantic song ever.” I am not ashamed to admit that this letter makes me tear up a little. It’s so earnest! All the superlatives and non-ironic references to art-making! It is so fucking uncool. But it is also exactly what it needs to be. Here is Gerwig, directing a first film that will define her career and put her on red carpets and ultimately lead to a historic best director nomination (only the 5th woman ever! Burn Hollywood down!), and yet deep down she is also still a girl who once let mascara flow down her face after some now-insignificant disappointment that felt at the time like the moon was falling out of the sky. Lady Bird is a movie I still cannot say anything coherent about, because I’m too close to it; I squirmed in my seat for the entire thing. I knew at once that I cherished it and also that I couldn’t talk about it with anyone, not without remembering every time I sobbed so hard outside dances that my throat hurt, not without cutting open veins I worked for decades to close. It was like watching a horror movie about myself. But I can say “Crash Into Me” is perfect for it, and also it is truly the most romantic song ever, even though it is, I think, about a dude jerking off while fantasizing about castles? And also, if that song was converted into a perfume, it would probably smell something like YSL’s Baby Doll, a saccharine, “youthful gourmand” that smells like peonies and pineapples and which I wore to my senior prom, where I was ditched halfway through by my date. Lady Bird and I both made it out alive, and so did Greta Gerwig. In the end, you leave behind what you need to leave behind. But I still have those CDs.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME - HF
Perhaps more than any other film I have ever seen, Call Me By Your Name is a movie you can smell. Several times during the movie, I inhaled deeply, as though I were standing in the middle of the lush scene portrayed instead of only watching it projected in two dimensions. Call Me By Your Name is an almost unbelievably textural movie, and in it these textures are not secondary but rather the substance of the film itself. I am often skeptical of adaptations of books I love, because I tend to love books in which the beauty of the prose is more the point than the plot or characters. Novels in which the prose operates at the level of poetry seemed to me to be essentially untranslatable to film until I saw how Luca Guadagnino brought Andre Aciman’s novel to the screen. Instead of trying to incorporate the novel’s prose through dialogue or voice-over, as most adaptations do, the film is nearly wordless (until one perfect moment at the end). It translates the book’s poetic language into a visual beauty so vivid that you can feel the sunlight and water and sweat on your skin and smell the greens and dust and cigarettes and rain coming in through the huge windows of a grand old house in the country. I wanted to eat this movie, which I think was exactly its intended effect.
Profumum Roma hails from a totally different part of Italy than that in which Call Me By Your Name is set. These perfumes are headquartered in the frantic bustle and churn of Rome, a city where history tangles carelessly with modernity, dusty cathedrals housing Caravaggio’s greatest canvases casually snarl with traffic and fast food restaurants, and everything is coated in an avid layer of grime. But Ichnusa, their fig perfume, is a scent about the country and the end of summer, about the sweetness and sting of pleasures right before they end, about the indulgence of trying to squeeze all the joy out of a single moment, stretching what is good and brief into a false and merciful infinity.
One of the most talked-about scenes in the movie is of course the scene with the peach. Ichnusa isn’t a peach scent, but its central, uncompromising fig is the same kind of sexualized fruit, representing the gross fleshiness of the body, its sweetness and decay. What is remarkable about this scene in the film is not the act with the peach itself, but the way that the act is framed as graceful instead of disgusting. In the world of this movie, desire does not have to overcome its own strangeness, but can instead revel in it. Ichnusa is an aggressively lush perfume, and unlike many other fig scents it doesn’t pull its punches, descending neither into clean green notes nor cheery florals. It’s the smell of fruit ground into the earth, and mossy water at night in secret. It smells like the kind of friendly hangover you have in the summer that guides you gently through the day, and like the late night dance party where you got the hangover. It’s sweat drying on skin in the last few days of August, when every sense is heightened by approaching loss. Like the movie, it is a reminder of the way that new awareness of one’s own body turns the whole world into a body, something that smells ripe and eager, weighty with longing.
THE SHAPE OF WATER -- RS
There is a daffy novel coming out in May called The Pisces by Melissa Broder, and it is all about having a torrid love affair with a merman. I just finished it, and will offer no spoilers, except to say that it is extremely...anatomical about the sex, and I for one appreciated knowing exactly what it would be like to fuck a fishperson. Hint: it involves a lot of barnacles! At one point, Broder writes “Was I really talking about birth control with a merman?” and that is when I realized that her novel is an erotic comedy and that I was allowed to laugh and that was such glorious freedom, as I hadn’t lol-ed along with a book in so long. Anyways, The Shape of Water is also about loving a sea creature, but it is absolutely not a comedy. Guillermo del Toro thinks that beasts are too precious to ever be ridiculed; he is in the business of making humans out of monsters and monsters out of humans. I appreciated his sentimental lean toward merpeople, too; there are so many fish in the sea, and so many ways to tell a story about falling head over fins for one. The Shape of Water is less about physical attraction and more about wordless communication across species, which is an allegory for xenophobia, to be sure, but it also happens to be exactly what perfume is for. So I figured, maybe best to go literal here. I’ve written about Dark Ride before, but I feel compelled to mention it again as it is a fragrance that smells exactly like an over-chlorinated swimming pool and is so weird and improbable that GDT himself might wear it. If you want something more everyday, but still reminiscent of the unknowable ocean, try Ancients, from Tanwi Nandini Islam’s beautiful Hi WIldflower line. It’s wet earth and rain, the loam that leads us back to the wilderness.
GET OUT - HF
Obviously I’m not the person who should be writing about Get Out, but here’s what I can say about it: I grew up surrounded by exactly the rich white people the film portrays and those people smell like Tommy Girl. My family lived for a long time on the campus of a small, wealthy private school where both my parents worked, and the scenes at the family estate, the polite and horrifying party, were sickeningly familiar from my childhood and teen years there. The girl played by Allison Williams was exactly the ideal to which everyone at that school aspired, the shimmering mascot of this whole superior, sick-hearted bubble where we praised ourselves for our good politics. That girl smells like Tommy Girl. Being this girl - rich, white, and adored - was exactly what Tommy Girl was selling when it launched this perfume in 1996. The same thing that allows women like this to get away with almost anything and perpetuate the deep-rooted violences the film portrays, was what made Tommy Girl so explosively popular that even teenagers could recognize it by smell. To wear it was a status symbol, a way to proclaim that you belonged.
An extremely polite fruity floral, without a touch of musk or decay, Tommy Girl is the scent of blamelessness. Tommy Girl was what the hot girls wore, but they were the girls who were hot in a way your parents could approve of, girls who ran for student leadership positions and played soccer and aspired to work in government, who threw parties out of the liquor cabinets in their parents’ large houses on the weekends but never got in trouble for it and had never spoken to a cop in their life. Many perfumes exaggerate or highlight the smells of the human body, but Tommy Girl is a perfume that negates them. It is the smell of white women because it promises that you don’t have to be a body at all; you can get someone else to be a body for you. It promises that the smells and the violences and the grossness of the world are somebody else’s problem. The women who wore Tommy Girl were clean no matter what crimes they committed.
One of the things that Get Out skewers is the position white women, and in particular young, wealthy white women from upper-class backgrounds, are allowed to inhabit in our society. A person like the character played by Allison Williams is a luxury commodity, meant to be protected at all costs. Even as her family’s creepiness and racism become (at first only partially) clear, Rose (who is of course named Rose) still manages to avoid blame for their actions, claiming confusion and innocence, performing outrage and wokeness. The biggest and most inevitable reveal of the film is when she is shown not to be innocent of her family’s crimes but in fact the actor who centrally fuels them, the morsel in the trap that makes the whole thing work. Tommy Girl smells like this kind of power, so clean and blameless on its surface that it has to have violence at its heart.
THE POST -- RS
Spotlight proved that Hollywood can, in fact, make a compelling film about newspaper journalism, even when it mostly involves slogging through notes and hours of lugubrious archival research and knocking on doors in puffer coats. The Post does not, unfortunately, continue in this tradition. Perhaps this is because Spielberg overshot the subject matter through his gauzy lens, so eager to turn his characters into Sparkly American Heroes Who Tell The Truth No Matter What rather than depicting them as basically boring human beings in bad pleated khakis whose collective breath smells like stale coffee and vending machine corn chips and who spend most of their hours under fluorescent lights rather than the glimmering marquee of justice. What Spotlight -- and All The President’s Men before it -- got right about newsrooms is that they are banal, deadening places where revolutionary work can, in a blue moon, seep out of red tape and bureaucracy. The Post tries to make newsrooms look glamorous, which is, as anyone who has ever worked in one can tell you, a bunch of lies. I mean, yes, Katherine Graham was excessively glamorous. She was a doyenne. She probably wore Madame Rochas. But the bullpen is not a place for fine French perfume. I imagine the actual atmosphere around The Post smelled something like the new Atelier Cologne Cafe Tuberosa, which is one of the oddest fragrances I have smelled in years. It is a pot of burnt coffee and a bouquet of noxious white florals in the same juice, which is probably what a conference room containing several beat reporters and Katherine Graham smelled like after a late night of making tough decisions. If only it had a tiny note of Pall Mall in it.
THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI - HF
Look, ok, I haven’t seen this movie and I’m not going to. Maybe I’m wrong and the whole internet is wrong and it’s a beautiful, nuanced film that has been unfairly maligned. But I’ve read quite a few reviews of it, and this seems extraordinarily unlikely. I was just going to assign this one Axe Body Spray, write one sentence - “Eau de Cop”- and be done. But instead, let’s talk about Creed’s Green Irish Tweed, or Eau de Things I Liked Before I Knew Better.
Green Irish Tweed is among the scents most frequently recommended for men who don't want to learn about perfume but do want to seem sophisticated. Its main notes are peppermint, lemon, and sandalwood, but their particular combination smells like going on a Tinder date at happy hour with someone who works in finance in Boston. It smells that way by association; men who go on those dates wear this scent, and they wear it because a magazine told them to. Three Billboards is, similarly, full of indicators that make it the kind of thing one should like. Its individual elements entitle it to be considered good. We are supposed to like a movie written by celebrated Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, starring celebrated American actress Frances McDormand, with a ponderous title and a plot about cops and redemption and grief and the lives of people in a small, neglected America town. It is a movie that has all the markers of prestige and yet none of the responsibility that goes with these markers, a film that seems to have substituted these superficial checkboxes for nuance, sensitivity, and difficult engagement. It demonstrates that executing the Prestige Movie dance diagram without deeper consideration of how a work will echo in the culture into which one offers it is not just lazy but actually harmful.
Similarly, I would guess that almost every man who wear Green Irish Tweed, and almost every women who says she likes how it smells, are really doing so because it seemed like the right thing to do or the right opinion to have. It’s a perfume that exists as the idea of something a man who knows what’s good would wear, but by wearing it one instantly telegraphs the opposite. I liked it when I was very young because I liked the idea that it was what important men wanted me to like, and that felt both safe and easy. There’s not so much danger to making this choice with perfume, except that you’ll miss out on a lot of better scents and smell like a one-episode villain on Cheers, but when making a wide-release prestige movie, instead of lazily choosing a bottle of smells, the stakes are much higher.
DARKEST HOUR -- RS
Floris London is a perfume house obsessed with history -- namely, its own. If you go onto Floris’ very, well, florid website, you will find an entire section devoted to the “World of Floris,” where by clicking on a jaunty painted portrait of a ruddy-cheeked man in a starched white cravat (or is it a gorget? A ruff? I can never keep the terminology straight but let’s just say he has a lot of unnecessary linens around the neck region) you learn that this man is none other than one Juan Flamenias Floris, who launched his fragrance business all the way back in 1730, when he was but a poor immigrant from Menorca trying to make his way in Georgian-era London. You will find out that Floris started out not with perfumes but with fine wooden combs, because he was a barber back on the Balearic Isles and combs happened to be something that he already knew a great deal about. You will also learn that his comb emporium opened on Jermyn Street, which was then and still is a very posh London street devoted to male fineries (mustache maintenance, pipe tobacco, leather brogues, persnickety tailoring). From combs came colognes-- a big business in the 1730s, when everyone smelled more or less like death from the moment they were born. In a jovial 1986 New York Times report about Jermyn Street’s storied past, a writer described the area as “a street where a man can pay $1,000 for a pair of shoes, $140 for a hat and with his last $17 face the decision of a shaving brush from Floris or a cigar from Alfred Dunhill.” So you know, like Diagon Alley but for the fanciest of fancyboys.
I mention Jermyn Street because the locale is important here (this is, after all, about Winston Churchill, and guess which cobblestone lane he liked to stroll down on a free afternoon?) but it is absolutely not to be confused with Savile Row, which is where the dapper dandies went and still go for their tweeds and three-piece suiting and where Daniel Day-Lewis had all of his Reynolds Woodcock clothes made for Phantom Thread (to be exact, he had his made at Anderson Sheppard, which over the years has made bespoke lapels for Noel Coward and Prince Charles and Tom Ford). No, Jermyn Street is much more about adornments, about the hundred tiny trappings of masculinity that add up to the musty patriarchal whole; it is about the brandy and also the snifters and also the cigars and also the Chesterfield sofas where the men sit while they have the brandy and cigars and it is also, undeniably, about the historical exclusion of women. Jermyn Street is a boy’s club made into an entire city block, and that will always be where Floris London began, even if they now make some of the most beautiful feminine fragrances on the market.
Anyways, Floris, being so enamored with its own three centuries of perfume-making (and I mean, why not??? So few businesses make it even three years!) is also the sort of fragrance house to keep impeccable records, so that later when someone wonders who their famous customers were, they can literally say “well, we have the receipts.” On the website, they prominently display a sales tab signed by one Winston Churchill, who popped in one afternoon in 1930 and bought several floral sachets and a few bottles of cologne, including Special No. 127, and Stephanotis, fragrances that make two very different statements about power. Stephanotis is all soft power -- lily of the valley, carnation, a light dusting of coriander. 127, which was apparently a Winston signature, is a citrus bomb: bergamot oil on top of oranges on top of petitgrain. I can imagine that if you were a person who, like Churchill, smelled mostly of cigars and scotch and duck fat, then putting on a glug of 127 must have felt refreshing, like a lemon twist on the rim of a rocks glass. But it was also a dark gilding, like everything else on Jermyn Street. In any case, this is how I imagine you can smell a little bit like this movie, which I have not seen -- it is not for me, it is for Dads; but I have also been avoiding it because its lead actor, despite being the frontrunner for the statue, has a dark past of his own. And there’s no fresh citrus squeeze that can allow me to sit easily with that. He’ll probably win (ed note: he did). London may have invented the boy’s club, but it is not confined to Jermyn Street.
DUNKIRK - HF
I have to admit I didn’t see Dunkirk. Thomas and I tried to buy tickets and it was sold out so we stood in front of the theatre making airplane noises with our mouths and then said it was like we had seen the movie. I’m terrified of both heights and airplanes so it’s probably for the best, and I trust a friend who’s married to a British man when she describes it as “a film about how good British people are at standing in lines.” But I did see the very long preview enough times to know that it’s about a certain type of heroic wartime Englishness, the kind that people glorify without ever having touched its events themselves.
What does in fact touch the living memory of WWII, the origin story of every “Keep Calm and Carry On” throw pillow in a London Airbnb, is Penhaligons. The brand’s first store was established in London in 1874, during Queen Victoria’s reign when the sun never set on the empire. Penhaligon’s was, like Floris a few decades earlier, also founded by a barber because, apparently, for a British man in the 1700s, being a barber was like being an instagram influencer today. Penhaligon’s, of course, also set up shop - where else?- on storied Jermyn Street, placing itself purposely within this same flourishing tradition of masculine adornment, all the tiny, expensive pieces and bits and collectibles of aspirational patriarchy, a world of power in details. Our enterprising barber would have chosen the location in Jermyn street in order to make clear the loyalties and promises of the thing it was selling, much like an 18th century version of Everlane placing its light-drenched flagship store on San Francisco’s Valencia Street.
Anyway, Penhaligon’s lineage is so cinematically British it practically seems like a joke. The scents are all polite and reserved, nothing shouty or demonstrative. There’s a clean watery undertone even to those that promise heady flowers and spices. The stores, and the bottles, are whimsical in a sort of theatrical bed and breakfast way, wood panelling and colorful ribbons and floral motifs, but the silliness and flourishes are somehow about duty: They’re the Gilbert & Sullivan musical of perfume.
Savoy Steam is a sort of signature of the brand, intended to smell like the inside of their London flagship store. This is relatively common thing for a certain type of brand to do, and one of my favorite scents ever was Agent Provocateur’s version of the perfume-that-smells-like-our-store back in their heyday, but anyway that’s an entirely different essay. Savoy Steam is almost comically masculine, in that Old Albion and Eton School and cricket sweaters way. The Eau de Cologne (significantly different from the Eau de Parfum, which adds several floral notes and is fine, but far more traditionally feminine) is meant to be worn as a “splash,” the final step of a gentleman’s shaving routine, and meant to smell like the experience of an old-fashioned hot-towel shave. The first word the brand’s website uses to describe the scent is “invigorating.” Although it isn’t meant to smell like the sea, its cold-water-first-thing-in-the-morning sense aligns with the water and steel-colored air that populate Dunkirk. Dunkirk is a lusciously made film about a serious tragedy, a story about death that’s also about tweed and fishermen’s sweaters and how good British people are at standing in lines, a movie in the classic tradition of the British prestige war movie about awful events in which every moment looks beautiful, each shot like an old-fashioned painting. Savoy Steam smells like this optimistically patriarchal telling of history, one that believes stoutly in doing what is difficult because it is difficult, putting a cheerful face on hardship, finding the silver lining. It’s keeping calm and carrying on, remembering why we fight, in a bottle.
Ed. Note: We both had (too many) things to say about Phantom Thread, so we both wrote about it. Enjoy.
PHANTOM THREAD -- RS
Phantom Thread is my favorite film of the year (with the exception of The Florida Project, which is perfect and should be nominated and look I am mad again) and not just because I have a weakness for mid-century silhouettes and sweeping operatic scores and the way the corners of Daniel Day-Lewis’ eyes crinkle when he smiles. For me, this film is not so much about erotic poisoning or emerald taffeta or the way artists like to eat Welsh Rarebit for breakfast, though it is about all of those things. I read Phantom Thread as a text about the intimate and secretive ways that two people sustain one another, the clandestine rituals that couples create and perpetuate in order to protect the unit. I mean, I also read it as a meditation on how beauty is terror (I think I put it on Twitter late one night like “Phantom Thread is almost impossibly beautiful though that is its whole point: the impossibility of beauty and the violence that occurs in its pursuit”) and about how women were, in a specific time and place, confined to societal boxes that left everyone deeply unhappy almost all the time (just look at Barbara Rose, high as a kite on seconal and drooping into her wedding cake, suicidally depressed and therefore unfit to represent the sophisticated, forced optimism of a Woodcock design).
Phantom Thread is also the only film nominated for Best Picture this year that has an actual, spoken reference to perfume in it, which probably merits a close reading. So here is the scene: Alma (Vicky Krieps), a poor immigrant girl of unknown origin, is on a first date with Reynolds Woodcock (DDL), a dressmaker of great renown who took a liking to her after she waited on him at a seaside inn. They are in Reynolds’ country home, where he has decided to fit Alma for a dress in his attic, his primary seduction technique. He asks her to strip down to her slip, an unflattering wisp of material the color of buttermilk. As she is shivering in her underthings, Reynolds’ sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville, who is so good in this film I could scream) arrives from London. Cyril, who runs the business end of the House of Woodcock, is what you might call a cold woman: she wears charcoal grey suits and keeps her hair in a tight chignon; her eyes are rheumy and perpetually red. She is exhausted and childless and zealously protective of her brother. She is the one who removes women when they no longer please him; she is the one who smooths out the wrinkles in his garments and in his life. As a result, we are led to believe that Cyril has no time for private passion of her own; she has given everything, including her youth, to the family business, and in the process her sense of empathy has curdled. When Cyril meets Alma for the first time, she is skeptical; here is another stray Reynolds has brought home. She sniffs at Alma’s neck as if inspecting for disease. “And who is this lovely creature making the house smell so nice?” Cyril asks, as she flares her nostrils wide; a compliment so barbed it sounds more like a curse. She sniffs out the notes of Alma’s perfume immediately: roses and sandalwood. That Cyril can identify these accords is an act of dominance -- she is saying, straight away, I know your formula, down to the last drop. It is the scariest five minutes of the film.
So, what perfume was Alma wearing that was stinking up the muslins? PTA has yet to reveal his inspirations, but given the location (the UK) and the time period (mid-1950s), she could very well have been wearing Caron Rose or Jean Patou’s Joy, both of which were notorious and widespread at the time. Not that Alma could afford either of these -- Joy, in particular, was a wealthy woman’s fantasia on the rose, with powdery sandalwood and a decadent civet tang. It was a couture perfume, to go with custom-made dresses; it is likely that Alma would have graduated into Patou once she moved into Reynolds’ world, but when she met him, she was probably still spritzing on a cheap imitation, like Yardley’s Flair. In a way, I sense that Cyril is pointing out the shortcomings of Alma’s perfume by noticing it; she knows from the moment she walks in which class Alma belongs to, and she wants Alma to know that she knows. Cyril is a hunting hound, with a nose trained on potential usurpers.
Ultimately, Alma and Cyril reach a détente. Alma proves herself a worthy adversary and ally by concocting a potion of her own design, one that bewitches and manipulates Reynolds more than any fragrance ever could. I won’t spoil this for you, but her creation involves wild mushrooms and vomiting and an excessive amount of butter. If you would rather emulate this aspect of the film, as deranged and twisty as it is (personally, I find it equally hilarious and brilliant), then you will have to turn away from vintage Joy and to something more modern. Apoteke Tepe’s After the Flood is a scent that relies heavily on a mushroom base, which sounds bonkers, but it is immaculate and gorgeous and to me, the closest a perfume has ever come to being cinematic. By which I mean, it swells; it delights, it consternates. I want to keep leaning in and sussing it out; I want to know how it works. It is still a mystery to me, which is why I keep coming back to it.
PHANTOM THREAD - HF
Phantom Thread is the only movie to date for which I have cared about spoilers. It’s a testament to how much I loved the film and how brilliant I believe it is that I think not knowing the plot twist in advance truly matters, so I will try to write about this without giving it away. If you haven’t seen it, you likely know from the internet that it’s about couture fashion, that Daniel Day Lewis frowns at dresses a bunch, and also that it’s about kink in some unclear way that your friends refuse to explain to you. What I can tell you is that the film is in part about the deceptive nature of surfaces and of what it is to want and to get. Paul Thomas Anderson is a filmmaker concerned with the way in which more than one thing can be true at the same time. This interest in contradiction is part of the reason his films are such elaborately baffling puzzles, and also part of the reason people have such sharply divided opinions on this movie.
Roja Parfums’ Enslaved Pour Femme was my wedding perfume. I swear I didn’t choose it for the (admittedly highly problematic) name. But the reason this scent seemed right for the occasion was that it is deceptive in the same way Anderson’s movie is deceptive, similarly concerned with the ability of two seemingly contradictory things to be true at once, telling a story about the difference between appearances and what unfolds beneath them. On its surface, Enslaved is an old lady perfume, powdery and heavy with old-fashioned classic perfume notes. In the same way, Phantom Thread is on its surface a pitch-perfect Merchant-Ivory movie, with sweeping shots of luxury fabrics and glamorous settings framing a muted, decorous story about a wealthy man who is difficult to love. Both seem at first to be something well-known and perhaps not particularly relevant. But just like Phantom Thread, Enslaved gets weirder as it goes on, with a turn at the end as gloriously perverse as the one at the end of the movie. Its notes deepen from the cheerful elegance of bergamot and orange blossom into the heady strangeness of jasmine and cedarwood, patchouli and musk. Although it is a perfume for women, as it opens on the skin, notes considered to be traditionally masculine, heavy vetiver and laudanum and ambergris, unfold themselves. The rich old lady perfume is not at all what it seems. In much the same way, what we share with and want from with another person, what compels us to find them and stay with them, is never what it appears. What seems to be a well-known story is something entirely other.
As a wedding scent, this ripening strangeness seemed like the correct note to strike. What develops between people as they figure out how to love one another is darker and stranger than the stories about it, and when it works it is most often not legible to the watching world. The longer you love someone the less easy the story between the two of you becomes; the longer something lasts the harder it is to chart its meaning and the direction in which power moves. Relationships endure by being more than one thing, by eluding definition, and by allowing contradictory truths to coexist. Negotiating how to make love last may be the topic of Phantom Thread, which is why the experience of watching the movie is somewhat seasick and disorienting, and even afterwards it is not necessarily possible to say if this is a heartfelt love story or a horror movie, a romantic comedy or a dark parable about the sickness of heterosexual love. Perhaps the truest thing is to say is that it is all of these at once. It exists in same sort of contradictory state as long-lasting romance, the same one that a perfume as deeply complex and seductive and strange as Enslaved allows one to inhabit in the wearing of it.