Review: Carol

Carol is a rapturous masterpiece of a film built on the simplest of stories: two people falling in love. The fact that it is a love story between two women set against the stifling societal backdrop of the 1950s may make it daring, but the film's true transgressive power lies in how its seeming specificity masks a shared universality. Who hasn't loved and lost? Who hasn't lost a love because of some circumstance, be it race, religion or sexuality?

Director Todd Haynes is no unfamiliar explorer on this terrain. His homage to the lustrously emotional Douglas Sirk melodramas of the Fifties, Far From Heaven, found Julianne Moore torn between her life as a perfect wife, mother and homemaker and her forbidden love for her black gardener. The film is a fitting companion piece to Carol, which mines a similar narrative: Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), trapped in a marriage already in acrimonious dissolution, endangers her standing by falling in love with shopgirl Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara).

There is more than mere going against the grain that complicates Carol and Therese's hesitant but blossoming romance. They may be united by their sexuality, but are separated by class, culture and experience. Certainly Carol's undeniably worldly air makes as much of an impression on Therese as the older woman's loneliness. There is much that she can learn from Carol who, bewitched by this strange, almost recessive girl, appears to hold all the power. Look again, and Carol is the one with everything to lose. Theirs may be a mutual attraction, but it is Therese who initiates the contact that will ignite their romance and the heart-stopping gesture that closes the film so stirringly.

Expertly adapted by Phyllis Nagy from 1952's The Price of Salt, which was written by Patricia Highsmith using the pseudonym Claire Morgan, Carol is a marvel, an achingly romantic melodrama comprised of nearly wordless looks, gestures and sideways glances that builds to bursting. Carter Burwell's score captures the yearning and the longing, the surges of passion, the accelerated beating of one's heart, the piercing pain of both intimacy and separation. Cinematographer Edward Lachman, who also lensed Far From Heaven, shoots the lovers through windows and doorways, creating frames within frames, highlighting their isolation and imprisonment. Visually, Carol possesses a less intense colour palette than Far From Heaven; compositionally and aesthetically, Lachman pays tribute to the likes of photographer Saul Leiter, who imbued pastoral qualities to his images of city life.

Haynes' direction has taken on a more emotional heft. Far From Heaven may have been his first foray into this era, but it was also the beginning of that emotional maturation. Haynes obviously loves the old Hollywood films of yesteryear but where he painstakingly recreated Sirk's meticulous mise-en-scène nearly to a fault, his callbacks in Carol enrich and enhance rather than distract. Brief Encounter is echoed in the film's opening scene, a despairing phone call harks back to Luise Rainer's celebrated scene in The Great Ziegfeld. Mara is an Audrey Hepburn gamine whilst Blanchett is an amalgam of Dietrich, Crawford and Garbo. Stripped of its artifice and cinematic valentines, Carol would still be a triumph of the heart.

Blanchett and Mara are two of the most metamorphic actresses to ever grace the silver screen. They hardly ever resemble themselves from film to film. It is thoroughly impossible to reconcile that this Therese is played by the same person who was the girl with the dragon tattoo; one can easily argue that Mara surpasses her breakthrough performance. Meek and mousy though she may be, Mara's Therese is as alluring and irresistible as Louise Brook's tempting Lulu in Pandora's Box. Blanchett is astonishing, by turns predatory and fragile, disheartened and encouraged, self-sacrificing and, in a most memorable scene, unwilling to deny her true self no longer.

Both actresses are beyond mesmerising, the love story exquisite, and there may be no more transcendent and triumphant final scene than the one in this superlative film. A must-see.

Carol

Directed by: Todd Haynes

Written by: Phyllis Nagy; adapted from The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (writing as Claire Morgan)

Starring: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler, Jake Lacy, John Magaro, Cory Michael Smith, Carrie Brownstein