A study of romance, fluidity and risk, when two women find love in the most unexpected place. A department store…
Adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt and touched by the creative genius of director, Todd Haynes, Carol (Cate Blanchett) is all at once hypnotically seductive. Yet, the film is about the stolen innocence of a shop keeper, Therese (Rooney Mara), smitten with her elegant socialite customer, Carol, who steps into her life and her department store counter.
The exquisite pacing makes the audience – and the storekeeper – succumb to a pin-drop silence whenever Carol appears. We can actually taste what the 1950s might have been like. Every shot is mesmerizing….a finger on the car’s dashboard defroster, a stolen hopeful glance, the taste of ruby lipstick whe Max Factor reigned.
The big bad wolf (Blanchett) is fixated on the store clerk and it’s only a matter of time before she pounces. There’s something forbidden about a story of two women falling in love in a time when women were forced to live in a society where such things were scandalous. Carol is a society wife and mother. Her husband (Kyle Chandler) expects her to behave a certain way. A ‘morality clause’ in their pending divorce says she could lose her young daughter if she doesn’t. The shop keeper too, is expected to accept a proposal from her boyfriend, Richard (Jake Lacy) and forever live a typical housewife life.
At times the story feels like Nabokov’s Lolita, Mara’s character seduced and ultimately tortured. At times it feels like Carey Mulligan starring bright-eyed in An Education. But Carol’s same-sex-love feels most like the forbidden love in Brokeback Mountain sans horses. And men.
Haynes directing transports us back to the same era as his former Far From Heaven, a film that might seem impossible to top. Alas, Carol is primal.
In the end, this is Rooney Mara’s film. She evolves into an Audrey Hepburn-esque goddess luminous on the big screen, having lived and loved. And mainly, lost.