As in almost every love story ever shown on screen, there is a moment in Todd Haynes's Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt, when the eyes of two strangers meet across a crowded room. Against the bustling backdrop of a New York department store at Christmas, Rooney Mara's shop-girl, Therese, catches sight of Carol (Cate Blanchett) lingering by a toy train set. Carol is older, wears expensive fur coats, and drinks martinis at lunchtime. These women are worlds apart, separated not only by the desk between retailer and customer, but also by age, class, and the quietly shifting social conditions of the 1950s.
This decade is sumptuously rendered in a cocktail of drowsy interiors, jingling piano refrains, and Sandy Powell's impeccable selection of costumes. It is one of the best-looking films I have had the pleasure of watching at the cinema, its colours and textures magnified by Edward Lachman's measured cinematography. The camera closes in on fussing hands and plaintive looks, little details that speak volumes about the two women's burgeoning, forbidden attraction.
Cate Blanchett is imperious as Carol. She slinks and prowls across the screen, redolent of a watchful lioness as she pursues the doe-eyed Therese. But she is by no means without her vulnerabilities, caught in the midst of a painful divorce, and on the cusp of a traumatic custody battle. Haynes could easily have created a definitive power imbalance between these two women, but this is a trap he avoids. At times, Mara's Therese reflects the image of Carol's daughter, with the same neat bob and chequered dresses. But she also resists the pitfalls of such a dynamic. Therese has her own ambitions: she wants to be a photographer, and, living alone in New York, she has a certain independence that eludes her older lover.
These are the subtle nuances of character that make this adaptation so compelling. As Carol's estranged husband Harge, Kyle Chandler could have been a stock villain, jealously berating his wife for her infidelities, and threatening legal consequences. Yet our sympathies lie in part with him, as with Therese's hapless boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy), who confidently reels off half-baked psychoanalysis when Therese tries to talk to him about homosexual love. In Carol, Haynes shows us how the historic persecution of gay men and women has left only victims, scapegoats, and a trail of broken hearts.
Thankfully, a lot of the cliches associated with lesbian fiction and films are avoided. It's not giving too much away to say that the conclusion is not entirely miserable. What is undoubtedly a difficult love is not fetishised into impossibility, and neither woman sheepishly crawls back to her man. The affair between Carol and Therese, although passionate and convincing, is a slow-burner, shadowed by a tentative uncertainty that feels true to the period. Carol is a masterpiece: deliciously crafted, beautifully acted, and singing with details that furnish its characters with the desires and frustrations of real lives.
