Carol (2015)
Directed by Todd Haynes
In 1950s New York, a department-store clerk who dreams of a better life falls for an older, married woman.
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46 films that influenced Carol
What critics say influenced Carol
Yes, we might recognize that the hand touching the shoulder echoes David Lean’s Brief Encounter and that the transcendent final scene is inspired by the blocking and camera moves (although not the averted eyes) of the Ernie’s Restaurant sequence in Vertigo .
Haynes even steals from the best, borrowing from Brief Encounter, the homage a symbol (in a work that’s full of them) of aiming higher than high.
In scripting Todd Haynes’s Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian romance novel The Price of Salt, screenwriter Phyllis Nagy borrows a structural device from Noel Coward’s script for David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945).
As a homage to David Lean’s 1945 classic Brief Encounter, the film is bookended by a scene in a restaurant where Carol and Therese are interrupted at an inopportune time.
Haynes was inspired by David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a 1945 romantic classic about an emotional affair that similarly begins and ends with the same scene, its meaning deepening the second time.
(Despite its period setting, “Carol” is not overloaded with film-school references, but there were moments when I could feel the undertow of “Roman Holiday” and David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” and Martin Scorsese’s underappreciated “The Age of Innocence.”)
Far From Heaven , the TV series Mildred Pierce and now the glorious Carol rekindle the spirit of an age when “women’s pictures” were commonplace in Hollywood, telling female-centred, taboo-breaking stories, featuring exceptional actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, whose characters face obstacles – prejudice around race, class, gender – that are no less prevalent today.
But after Far From Heaven and his adaptation of Mildred Pierce for HBO, his experiment in period moviemaking feels less a tribute to directors like Douglas Sirk and more like the cinematic necrophilia of his short Karen Carpenter film.
His first foray into this style, Far From Heaven, was half homage to women’s picture king Douglas Sirk, half postmodern chiding of the genre’s limitations, but after readapting Mildred Pierce into a compulsively watchable miniseries on HBO, Haynes is ready to play it straight.
In 2011’s HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, he supersized the 1945 Joan Crawford original’s tragic feminism and made his update feel urgent and new.
But other of his works, including the Julianne Moore-starring "Far From Heaven" and the James M. Cain "Mildred Pierce" adaptation for HBO, have a visual look that the technicians of Hollywood's Golden Age might envy.
Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in top form as a pair of women drawn together in spite of the intrusive men around them, “Carol” undeniably marks Haynes’ most contained work, though it also shows the influence of the director’s several period dramas preceding it — including his “Mildred Pierce” miniseries for HBO and, most significantly, his 2002 refashioning of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, “Far From Heaven.”
(Despite its period setting, “Carol” is not overloaded with film-school references, but there were moments when I could feel the undertow of “Roman Holiday” and David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” and Martin Scorsese’s underappreciated “The Age of Innocence.”)
And rather than Carol and Theresa’s relationship existing as a beautiful thing belonging to a particular time in one’s life – the message that singularly made Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck’s liaison in Roman Holiday (1953) so rich and memorable – Haynes is reluctant to close the book on it.
Mara looks like she just accepted an Oscar for Roman Holiday.
Yes, we might recognize that the hand touching the shoulder echoes David Lean’s Brief Encounter and that the transcendent final scene is inspired by the blocking and camera moves (although not the averted eyes) of the Ernie’s Restaurant sequence in Vertigo .
It’s the film’s skill in portraying the two women’s emotional arcs with such precision that makes its final moment so radiant, achieving an effect not unlike the one Hitchcock managed in the first vision Scottie has of Madeleine in “Vertigo.”
Haynes utiliza la puesta en escena para guiar emocionalmente al espectador sin que este se dé cuenta (esos planos de la magnífica Rooney Mara, como Blanchett, en el extremo izquierdo del encuadre, para mostrarlo a la deriva), y como ya hicieran Hitchcock y Powell en los cincuenta (el restaurante de Vértigo, en la memoria), aplican los dominantes colores rojo y verde en un mismo plano como elemento dramático además de estético: los jerseys de las protagonistas en la cafetería.
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But other of his works, including the Julianne Moore-starring "Far From Heaven" and the James M. Cain "Mildred Pierce" adaptation for HBO, have a visual look that the technicians of Hollywood's Golden Age might envy.
“Carol” is the latest film from director Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven”), and arguably his best.
They would be being themselves in the 1950s, an era director Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven”) excels at capturing.
Director Todd Haynes went deeper and farther with 2002’s acclaimed “Far From Heaven,” another melodrama inspired by prolific '50s director Douglas Sirk.
If that's true, then Carol, the romantic drama from director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), goes one step further by photographing the photo of the photo, and thereby creating a hazy, distant depiction of forbidden love.
An obvious companion piece to Haynes’ “Far From Heaven” and “Mildred Pierce,” and no less painstaking in its intricate re-creation of a mid-20th-century American milieu, the Weinstein Co. drama (set for a Dec. 18 release) should have little trouble translating critical plaudits, especially for Cate Blanchett ’s incandescent lead performance, into significant year-end attention.
The words “homosexual” and “lesbian” are never once uttered, presumably a reference to the fact that the word “homosexual” was never used in a film until 1961’s Victim , which was subsequently banned in the UK and US because of it.
The austerity of Carol reminds you of Brokeback Mountain , that other great gay romance set in a hostile time.
As a rare prestige picture centered around a homosexual relationship set during a much less tolerant era, “Carol” stands to generate perhaps an even warmer audience embrace than “Brokeback Mountain” did 10 years earlier, hopefully absent much of the snickering embarrassment that soured the otherwise widespread acclaim for Ang Lee’s classic.
In that sense, Carol offers a female equivalent to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain .
Unlike Brokeback Mountain , which started early with the controversial same-sex love scene to get it out of the way and concentrate on the aftermath and emotional complication of their sudden but denied relationship, Carol builds toward it, trying to make a gratuitous scene feel as artful as it can.
(A Brokeback Mountain comparison wouldn’t be entirely inapt).
“Carol” sometimes feels overly steamy, as if physical desire were the main bond between this confident older woman and her less certain lover (a dynamic that has appeared in other gay movies like “High Art” and “Brokeback Mountain”).
For the majority of the first half, when sexuality is cloaked under euphemisms and could be interpreted as nothing more than a close friendship, it resembles the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , a stage play with overtly homosexual themes about sexual repression.
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But it is director Todd Haynes, oozing the confidence that defined 2002’s Far From Heaven , who is the real magician here, combining the subversive clout of his 1991 Jean Genet-inspired Poison with the flawlessly empathetic character study of 1995’s Safe and the swooning period detail of 1998’s Velvet Goldmine .
Since his early days with “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” and “Safe,” Haynes has developed sophisticated narratives out of existing cultural reference points.
Director Haynes is a noted name in the so-called New Queer cinema - though his varied filmography, which includes the Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven, the underrated Safe and the poetic Dylan collage I'm Not There, ranges widely outside that territory.
It has been exciting to watch Haynes mature as a filmmaker, starting with his super 8 film "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" and progressing through films like "Poison," "Safe," and "Far From Heaven."
In other words, it's thematically exactly what you suppose the story about two women falling in love during the Eisenhower administration would be, doubly so when it comes from the director of Far from Heaven, and if there's one thing that tempers my immediate gut response to the film (which was, for the record "This is his second-best film after Safe ), it's that Carol is alarmingly straightforward for a Todd Haynes film.
To me, Haynes is one of our great directors, and with his best films, Safe (1995), Far from Heaven (2002), and I'm Not There (2007), he managed both touchingly emotional explorations of human behavior as well as structural commentaries of the same.
A projection-booth glimpse of “Sunset Blvd.” and a proliferation of Santa hats set the scene as Christmas 1950.
On the television is a scene from Sunset Boulevard (1950) with William Holden in a tux.
“I’m charting the correlation between what characters say and what they mean,” says a film buff while watching Sunset Boulevard in Todd Haynes’ Carol .
Dannie works at the New York Times and has seen Sunset Boulevard six times, appropriately noting that he keeps watching it to see all the things that they mean but aren’t saying, and hear all that the things that they’re saying but not doing.
While watching Sunset Blvd., one character remarks, “Right now I’m charting the correlation between what the characters say and how they really feel,” and you could make your own flow charts for Carol.
At one point in the film, a character watching Sunset Boulevard takes notes during the film, telling Therese that “he’s charting the correlation between what the characters say and what they’re really feeling”, before begin rebutted with “My kid brother here, the Movie Jerk”.