Todd Haynes' CAROL, adapting Patricia Highsmith's pseudonymous early '50s lesbian romance

this reminds me that bresson wanted to cast burt lancaster and audrey hepburn in his "lancelot" film -- he wrote to george cukor asking for his assistance in getting a hold of them.

(this is in the early 1960s IIRC, at least a decade before he got the film made, with somewhat less famous leads)

yeah tbh the more i think about it the more i thought this was just fine, i wasn't strongly moved by it, esp compared to FFH or even MP

John Waters' blurb on the movie worth considering: https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201510&id=56221

Brody lovin' the grain on second viewing

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/carol-up-close

waters's comment was hilarious. "almost reborn"!

why anyone takes brody seriously is beyond me.

that was snotty, sorry. his comments on carol are interesting. the problem w/ brody is whenever i actually know a lot about a subject he's pontificating on (which isn't too often), it's obvious how little he knows/understands. i'd use the word "poseur." so i'm inclined to be skeptical when i read him.

oh thanks Todd for casting this cube of sugar as the "notions salesman"

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/497435376-actor-cory-michael-smith-attends-the-carol-gettyimages.jpg

not gonna watch "Gotham" to see him as the pre-Riddler tho

ok let's try...

http://www2.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/53rd+New+York+Film+Festival+Carol+Arrivals+Cgotsd8Y3ZZl.jpg

ive somehow not read any reviews of this (TH returning to 50s melodrama was enough to make me want to see it). but all the hype and raves made me suspicious, so i wasnt expecting a perfect masterpiece. which was a good thing really as it isnt what people have made it out to be, or perhaps want it to be, so badly.

it lacks the emotional power of sirk or FFH, which is the biggest flaw for me. it does move you in the final few scenes, but even then, not quite enough. it seemed like quite a choppy script. one that maybe had been in the works so long that it had been drafted so many times that there wasnt really very much left (not read the book, so not sure if it is also quite bare like the film, but know haynes and nagy introduced some of their own scenes like the one with the lawyers). weirdly reminded me of in the mood for love in this way (except it wasnt improvised). there was this sort of sketch like approach to documenting their relationship.

the main surprise i had was the graininess of the film, and how it didnt have the sweeping sort of visuals i remember far from heaven as having - this looked almost like a cinema verite filmmaker was drafted into work on a lavish 50s period piece. which was cool in a way, but it felt detached. i never felt involved in any of it until the last 25 mins or so. blanchett seemed hard to really know or feel for, as she was in queen cate mode (maybe this is her character, from what i know the book is more about therese, and i dont know why the film reverses this), and terese, i wanted to know better. its an odd film, reminds me of PTA's recent two, quite icy, feels at a remove, more about the formalism rather than the material. very much a directors film. also quite cerebral for a romance, more about what it doesnt do (ie a love story not from the vulnerable partners end), than what it does. lovely to look at, quite sensual, and maybe an interesting twist on genre expectations, but doesnt quite do enough beyond that for me. as muted as the characters have to be.

"but it does retain a feeling of menace, of collapse - of the unified self, or the well-ordered life - lurking just around the corner.)"

forgot about this - yes, it does this well, and the stuff about sizeing someone else up as a partner too. still not sure the ideas about shooting through windows to reflect fractured notions of self etc etc though, i think it just seemed a way to make it harder to get to know the characters, to make the film a little more self consciously 'challenging'.

which was cool in a way, but it felt detached.

Haven't seen it but that's par for the course with Haynes ('formalism' etc.)

was FFH so detached? i remember it (rightly/wrongly) as being quite unashamedly emotional.

yes, from my seat. it's the same nonfan POV on TH for years, only here it's finally true.

Can't remember FFH specifically but I caught a re-screen of Safe yesterday - cold/distant are all over the design of the film. Just in time for xmas. xp

safe seems a closer fit... carol really made me think that TH is still very much an 'indie' director (with all the flaws/bonuses that come from that), but carol is being evaluated as a pic firmly in the hollywood tradition.

*indie in the 80s/90s sense

i dont think any of the cast deserve oscars though - they work well enough for the purpose of the film, but the real work on this film is the cinematography, the costuming, set design etc. all the stuff the grand budapest hotel won for a while back more or less. if only there was an award for most fully realised aesthetic.

The world of film deserves no less than another award for something or other. I suggest most trascendental experience.

I keep thinking Blanchett's casting is too on the nose in a scary way; I'm wincing in anticipation.

"deserve Oscars" is a phrase i equate with "deserves no anesthesia"

"trascendental experience".

hoping i can award this to the new guy maddin film

was thinking about how it might be that the coldness, and sense of unfullfillment it seems to engender in the viewer (or me at least) might be a way to communicate what the characters feel (their inability to express their feelings for each other openly), or have to endure, but i think that might be over reaching.

is this the same "coldness" that ppl accuse Kubrick of? bcz, i don't know, there aren't puppies?

no, i think the coldness (or 'coolness' as some reviews seem happier with) of carol is to do with the determination to avoid the cliches of romantic cinema (ie emotion) - it keeps you distant from them (perhaps just because there isnt anything much in the script to really get you into their minds or bodies), so its all about tiny micro details and movements/expressions rather than any remotely big larger. i know that is prob what turns a lot of arthouse viewers on, but it doesnt reveal enough i dont think, and ends up as a sort of dramatic/emotional flatline. with kubrick i think the coldness is more about how he directs, that formal austerity, rather than lack of emotional involvement in the story or characters. in carol, i care more about the decor than the lovers.

its all about tiny micro details and movements/expressions rather than any remotely big larger. i know that is prob what turns a lot of arthouse viewers on, but it doesnt reveal enough i dont think, and ends up as a sort of dramatic/emotional flatline

I agree. Finally saw it, and it probably does all it can with the shooting-through-car-windows stuff; some of the dissolves at the beginning, meant to suggest Mara's dislocation, are apposite and eloquent. I was more moved by the last act: Mara partying, disconsolately, in the Village flat with NYT mates. Obv the way she exchanged telling glances (in long shot, of course) with the other lesbian recalled Dennis Quaid and the boy at the Miami Beach pool in FFH, but I like how Haynes drew out Therese's growing confidence as a lesbian: she's getting looks, she's getting sized up, she's learning to like it.

I'm in Eric's camp. I liked it. The interest in furniture and decor and dresses didn't smother me like it did in FFH; he's a subtler filmmaker in some ways now. And, yeah, the performances didn't stand out other than Blanchett's feral gaze and Mara's mask of lust. The thing is, Haynes can do a certain kind of hysteria well: Safe remains my favorite of his movies, and the Veda-Mildred relationship is in that territory.

I wonder if the acclaim wouldn't be so insistent had it been released in March.

Can't remember FFH specifically but I caught a re-screen of Safe yesterday - cold/distant are all over the design of the film. Just in time for xmas. xp

― xyzzzz__, Monday, December 7, 2015 6:22 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well SAFE is rather explicitly modeled on 1960s art cinema that epitomizes cold (or at least 'distanced') and intellectual -- Antonioni, Kubrick's 2001.... in a way that film is nearly as much of a pastiche as FAR FROM HEAVEN.

i admire Haynes, and i used to really, really like some of his films. but with the possible exception of MILDRED PIERCE, they often seem very much like highly accomplished grad-school exercises. they seem like closed systems... they seem designed to be interpreted in the same critical terms that informed their design.

(FWIW the only Haynes film i think is a genuine failure on formal terms is VELVET GOLDMINE, which i could barely will myself through.)

sorry for umpteen repetitions of "they seem..."

Velvet Goldmine tries to summon a Dionysian spirit when the creator is a self-hating Apollonian.

yeah the whole thing feels like a summer camp where the counselors are yelling at you to HAVE FUN DAMMIT! BE TRANSGRESSIVE!

but mostly i just think the film really shows up the limitations of haynes's formal gifts at that point in his career. he's gotten better since, i think. but in the late '90s i guess he could do distant, planimetric formalism but hepped-up musical numbers, montage sequences, and rapid parallel editing were just kind of beyond him. it feels like a film-school short extended to feature length with all the implied clumsiness and leadenness.

What perplexed me was how hamhandedly he tried to insert the queer overtones; it should have come naturally! (although most of the evidence suggests glam was more het than queer: straight guys discovering they get chicks by wearing lipstick).

for all the film's rah-rah-queerness stuff it felt strangely ironed out... like haynes wanted to illustrate this fairly simple thesis about the liberating potential of gender play but either couldn't imagine or deliberately left out anything genuinely strange or complicated. in its own way it feels as square as one of those 1950s 'social problem' films like GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT or something.

another way of putting that is that it felt inauthentic -- the work of someone who idealized (and in the process, simplified) the glam subculture and reduced it to a few obvious signifiers.

A couple of other things I appreciated about Carol:

(a) It treated homosexuality as a common perversion acknowledged and tolerated by urbanites if you weren't affected (and those who lived in rural America, as many novels and essays have shown). The couple's first scene, the one at the Plaza, sets the tone. We see them from the POV of Therese's friend, and there's no question that their body language suggests they've been intimate. A later scene in which Therese's boyfriend calls her attraction to Carol a crush is staged with admirable straightforwardness. He's not OMIGOD YOU LOVE A WOMAN. It's true to what we know, and what my grandmother tells me: we weren't stupid, we knew this stuff went on.

(b) It preserves Highsmith's antipathy towards children. Carol may genuinely love her child, but it's clear that Therese will never love that child, and the child may not like any of them.

(c) The decades of resentment shared by Abby and Hardge. Their one scene was a quiet knockout.

the Frank Rich piece i linked way back pointed out that two women together could, in their way, 'get away with' more than two men in pre-Stonewall America.

or maybe it was the haynes FC interview, i don't know

boston marriages etc.

What perplexed me was how hamhandedly he tried to insert the queer overtones; it should have come naturally! (although most of the evidence suggests glam was more het than queer: straight guys discovering they get chicks by wearing lipstick).

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 10 December 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When did you come to this stunning realisation?

Amateurist - if this is what people are doing at grad school then sign me up. I think Haynes is unusually good at talking about film - but also in that academic way (which I consider it to be really good when he does it - but might be well recognised around here so maybe that gets under people's skin.

he is good at talking about film! he's very wedded to some critical tropes he encountered in the 1980s, though. but i'm not really talking about haynes /talking/ -- i was referring more to the way that some of his films are inspired in large part by ideas that were circulating in the academic field of film studies (and the post-structuralist trend in the humanities) in the 1980s and 1990s. that in itself isn't a problem, either! it's just that sometimes i feel like his films are closed systems, that they provide their own interpretive apparatus, and that limits their interest for me. at least these days.

took me a moment to realize that the FC interviewer was Nick Davis.

i hear some ppl think his films are closed systems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbE9N6LRpG0

feel like my opinion of Haynes' output is the exact opposite of everyone on this thread so far (I haven't seen Carol, I probably will at some point - although I also thought I would enjoy his Mildred Pierce and got bored with that fairly quick)

like SAFE is okay but all the criticisms of stiffness, awkwardness, "closed system" I feel can be applied to that and it largely left me cold whereas I absolutely love his music stuff (VG and I'm Not There). Far From Heaven also v good.

xpost

i don't get a sense that we all agree! what do you think is the 'consensus'

my opinions on his films wouldn't be well-served by a 'ranking' not only b/c i have changed my feelings about several of them multiple times, but because i really admire a lot of aspects of e.g. SAFE while feeling like i recognize its limitations more and more.

i guess i found both of the music films overly didactic, even more like films à thèse than SAFE. but even in I'M NOT THERE there were lots of fugitive awesome things in the set design, editing, costuming, etc. it's just that i was totally allergic to the general gestalt of politically-correct poststructuralist noodling.

btw sorry if i'm repeating myself, morbs et al

god knows nobody on ILX has ever done such a thing before

p clear consensus that Velvet Goldmine is awful and Safe is great, both of which I strenuously disagree with. Seems like consensus is also that Carol is flat and unsuccessful but as noted I haven't seen.

xp

reaallllly don't want to talk much more film here but i will say that as far as the movie is concerned it matters much more that carol sees something in her than that we see something in her.