Carol (dir. Todd Haynes, 2015)
December 1952. Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a young woman in her twenties, lives alone in her New York apartment, where she has to light the oven for warmth. She works the counter at Frankenberg’s, a department store that offers a whole two weeks vacation after five years employment, an entire month after fifteen, and a genuine pension on retirement. It was a different decade. Therese has a steady boyfriend in Richard (Jake Lacy). They have vague plans to travel to Europe, but they haven’t even shared a bed together. A retail job at Christmas is distilled misery for workers. In Therese’s case, she has to wear a Santa hat while smiling at customers and appeasing her manager, a Frankenberg lifer. This Christmas, though, will change Therese’s life. She meets Carol.
Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) is married to Harge (Kyle Chandler). They have a daughter together, but the marriage is strained and the two are essentially emotionally estranged, sharing space but not a life. The reason for this is apparent to us now, and frankly so was it then. They just labeled it as a deviance, a disorder, an aberration from normal sexuality.
This narrative began as a 1952 novel titled The Price of Salt written by a pseudonymous author calling herself Claire Morgan. The author finally acknowledged her true identity in 1990 as Patricia Highsmith, best known for her crime novels and book series featuring amoral con artist and murderer Tom Ripley. A fairly straightforward romance, albeit one featuring two women, was unlike her usual subject matter, but then The Price of Salt was unlike most books published in the 1950s featuring queer protagonists. It doesn’t end in tragedy.
Retitled Carol upon its republication, the book was adapted to the screen by playwright Phyllis Nagy and directed by Todd Haynes. Haynes has split his career between experimental features like Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There and his take on what were once known as ‘women’s pictures.’ The style and approach varies significantly. His miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce, for instance, is a straight retelling of the novel rather than the noir-ified version starring Joan Crawford. Safe, on the other hand, takes us inside the mind of a woman suffering from sick house syndrome, which may or may not be a real thing. Then there’s Far from Heaven, which is his version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, but one that includes subject matter that would not have made it past the self-censorship of Old Hollywood.
What then is Carol? It’s a love story, just like the book, one that is fairly finely told and performed by a talented cast. It’s why it’s so beloved by fans [1].
There is more to Carol than that, though. It is a piece of veiled social history. The cultural industry has buried the late forties and early fifties. That immediate postwar period was much different than what the combined forces of film, television, McCarthyism, and the cult of suburbia and the housewife would have us believe. Women worked outside the home as they always have done. Homosexuality existed. It wasn’t born out a thrown brick at Stonewall, but instead had its own subculture. I was also struck on this viewing by how the film incorporates certain tropes that I associate with the 1950s. There is a marriage and divorce narrative here. There is a road trip. There is a little bit of Village bohemia. There is a private investigator and someone pulling the trigger on a gun. There is the story of a young person’s first love and someone older falling for someone younger. These are all distinguished, though, by the fact that two women are at the center of them. And why shouldn’t they be?
[1] I would count myself as one of them except that I have not yet read The Price of Salt or attended a repertory screening of the film, both of which I believe are required to be considered a true Carol head.
oliveresque 