Carol
Todd Haynes has turned Patricia Highsmith's novel of lesbian love in Fifties New York into an exceptionally beautiful film, with a career-best performance from Cate Blanchett.
Carol is gorgeous, gently groundbreaking, and might be the saddest thing you’ll ever see. More than hugely accomplished cinema, it’s an exquisite work of American art, rippling with a very specific mid-century melancholy, understanding love as the riskiest but most necessary gamble in anyone’s experience.
Everything in this long-gestating adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel feels weighted to perfection. The film’s a smorgasbord of edible Fifties design which finds meaning in the smallest details.
Many of the most stunning sequences here are inside cars - it’s halfway to a road movie, as Carol and Therese escape on a trip West to consummate their affair away from prying, disapproving eyes. Lachman works utter magic when they drive through a tunnel to get off Manhattan, getting in up close as they flirt, finding a symphony of reflections and hues bouncing off the windscreen, thrilling to their potential together.
It’s jazz and poetry and just wonderful. To quote a colleague and thwarted male suitor of Therese’s, Dannie (John Magaro), their energy as lovers is “like physics - pinballs, bouncing off each other”. Carter Burwell’s score, meltingly high and hopeful for this sequence, elsewhere stakes out a striking homage to Philip Glass, which works perfectly for the period and the whole mood. The low ostinatos seem to threaten the couple with heartbreak before they’ve even met.
Haynes makes unhappiness beautiful. It makes sense that he’s a fan of Edward Hopper, whose paintings inform this film profoundly. In fact, it’s an Edward Hopper picture as surely as Far From Heaven was a Douglas Sirk picture: think of the diners, the angular rooftops, those forlorn people sitting on the edges of beds.
Blanchett resists every temptation to vamp up the role’s melodrama - you couldn’t quite say that of her Oscar-winning Blue Jasmine work - and the emotional place she reaches is wilted, drained to the dregs, and just extraordinary.
She has a scene trying to reason with Chandler’s Harge in front of their lawyers, which lays bare the dismay of their lives so honestly and exhaustedly it wipes you out. Once we’ve come full circle to the tea scene, and hear Carol’s next act of pleading, it’s cut off after the three most powerful words in the English language, delivered by an actress who couldn’t possibly say them more powerfully.
The scene, like the whole film, is a solar-plexus knockout.
'Cate Blanchett will slay you'
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