"Never touched a woman before? Then how can you be a tailor?”

Wong Kar Wai’s “Phantom Thread” (how’s that for a hook?), “The Hand” has long been disregarded as a curio due to the circumstances of its creation: It was conceived as one of three segments in the omnibus film “Eros,” which collected shorts original by Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh, and Wong into a triptych of love and sexual desire. Two of the shorts were forgettable, to put it kindly. The other is just about perfect. And why shouldn’t it be? Not only was Wong unfairly well-suited for the assignment, he’s also been making crystalline short films for his entire career — but smeared into each other in ways that…

Wong Kar-wai's exploration of the ways in which we act out our love for another have typically revolved around the pure, the mundane, little gestures we do for the other that are romantically-charged in ways that stick with us for the rest of our lives and so then cede to the nostalgic (the yearning) after-the-fact. It's corny as hell, but I'll always think about the ways in which Cop 223 transplants his love into symbolic gestures – the pineapple cans especially for how absurd it is removed from context yet revealing an impulsive dedication to his loved that's reminiscent of good ol' romanticism, just in a modern milieu.

Here he's at his most explicit and erotic which is 1. a…