Watched the superb film Carol again tonight. I've written of it elsewhere, my journal or on FB. I had seen it in Chattanooga with Starr. The love story, set in the 1950s and based on the novel, could not be more beautifully rendered. It is a masterpiece, a work of art that patiently, with sumptuous detail, allows the relationship it explores to come to life. The character of Carol wore the same bracelet in a couple of scenes and the gold choker that my mother wore. I still have the bracelet; Mom sold the gold necklace after her divorce.
The review below gives a glowing overview. I loved the music as well, and was pleased to see actors now well-known that were not so well-known when the film was released.
Carol
Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Carol review – Cate Blanchett superb in a five-star tale of forbidden love 5/5 stars
Todd Haynes’s 50s-set drama in which Blanchett’s divorcing woman falls for Rooney Mara’s doe-eyed shop assistant is an intoxicating triumph.
The cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces … the tinkling piano in the next apartment. Todd Haynes’s narcotic and delicious film Carol is in love with this kind of detail: the story of a forbidden love affair that makes no apology for always offering up exquisitely observed minutiae from the early 1950s. It is almost as if the transgression, secrecy and wrongness must paradoxically emerge in the well judged rightness and just-so-ness of all its period touches. The movie finds something erotic everywhere – in the surfaces, the tailoring, the furnishing and of course the cigarettes. It revives the lost art of smoking at lunch, smoking with gloves, and the exotic moue of exhaling smoke sideways, out of consideration for the person in front of you.
Cate Blanchett plays Carol, an unhappy, divorcing woman who falls instantly in love with department store assistant Therese, played by Rooney Mara, who is selling Carol a toy train as a Christmas present for her daughter. A counter-intuitive present for the 50s, of course, but the point is that it’s large, so it has to be delivered; Carol must therefore give Therese her address and then, accidentally on purpose, she leaves her gloves behind on the counter.
Blanchett’s performance is utterly right, her hauteur and elegance matched with fear and self-doubt. When I first saw Carol at Cannes this year, she reminded me of a predatory animal suddenly struck with a tranquilliser dart. On watching it again, what I noticed was Blanchett continually touching her face and stroking her hair as she speaks to Therese: a “poker tell” of desire. Rooney Mara is doe-eyed and callow, submissive yet watchful (she is a would-be photographer), her faintly dysfunctional fringe often schoolgirlishly framed in a sweet pom-pommed beret.
Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy has superbly adapted Patricia Highsmith’s original 1952 novel The Price of Salt, a bestseller at the time under the pen name Claire Morgan. Nagy’s version brings out both the drama and the swoony, ambient mood; Haynes’s direction and Affonso Gonçalves’s editing take her script at a cool andante. The screenplay slims down the novel’s tendency to oblique talkiness; it cuts down on use of the phrase “I love you”; and interestingly it does not hint at Carol’s rather Hellenic suggestion in the original that gay love is a higher form than straight, a more balanced relationship.
There is a shrewd homage to Brief Encounter, and the film also allows you to see the lineaments of classic Highsmith crime. The two women’s discontent casts light on a structural homoeroticism in Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, famously filmed by Hitchcock: two men collude in a transgression to be rid of their respective encumbrances. Carol takes this through the gender looking glass, although here the transgression is a matter of love and free will. Therese is no Ripley: she is not manipulative or parasitical in the way she might be in another sort of story – the sort, in fact, that might want to insist on an unhappy ending for gay love – but the two lovers take off together, on the lam almost. There is the Nabokovian flourish of a revolver.
Sarah Paulson gives a smart supporting performance as Carol’s easygoing confidante and former lover Abby. Kyle Chandler is superb as her furious husband Harge – short for Hargess, but here suggesting an unsexy combination of “hard” and “large”. He is angry and unhappy, boorishly hating himself for not having punished Carol more for her previous infidelity. His contribution amplifies the complex dynamic of this new love affair: she is in revolt against his domestic mastery and he is on the point of taking Carol’s infant daughter away from her in a custody battle. Therese is not merely to be Carol’s lover but quasi-daughter, someone who will come under her protection.
The film shows us the corsetry and mystery with which gay people in the 1950s could manage their lives with dignity, but it also inhales the clouds of depression and self-control into which Carol has had to retreat and from which she is now defiantly emerging, a prototypical version of Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique, announced a decade after this.
The writing and performances are superb, the production design and costumes by Judy Becker and Sandy Powell tremendous. And the effect is intoxicating.
From the Guardian:
--Jack
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