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

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

the fact that SAFE topped the village voice's "best films of the 1990s" poll seems like a good emblem of its virtues and limitations IMO

it's like, yes it has a ton going for it, but some of its limitations and problems come from precisely those aspects of it that make it catnip to film critics (esp. of the highbrow variety)

anyway I don't think we should rehash my opinions of VG on this thread (we can look up the VG threads for that), but I will say that it bums me out that that movie routinely gets pilloried from both sides - from fans of the glam scene/music who are outraged at all the things it "get wrong" and from Haynes' usual coterie of arthouse film supporters who are disappointed in how it handles the cultural politics.

xp

in my view both of those angles attack the film for failing to do something it was not really designed or intended to do, ie the criticisms are misplaced

Seems like consensus is also that Carol is flat and unsuccessful but as noted I haven't seen.

The consensus here, maybe, but even here there's a range of enthusiasm. Also: it's doing spectacularly well in critics polls.

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.

And that he watched a lot of 70s film. Like really closely watched Fassbinder and Akerman (really striking how the framing of so many shots on Safe are to all that. I had only seen in on TV before)

What do you mean by 'closed systems'? What is an 'open system'?

I took that to mean that they're hermetic, they don't reference or bear any resemblance to anything outside of the film or its clearly stated reference points

this film refers to gay life...?

Well ask amateurist then

let's not

ugh when did ilx become an all caps film title venue, please we have italics

re the consensus on this movie though it is kinda fascinating & to me v unfamiliar the degree to which everyone - people who liked it, those who didn't - seems to be trying to express the way in which it was somehow almost intangibly dissatisfying; for me this is the uncanniness, for others its slight, &c. even when i hear people receptive to it, even brody's weird qualified rave, everything seems compelled just to make time to at least register this abstract frustration

xp alright Crime BREEZE.

i am working on a new stylesheet that allows you to use simple code - [w][/w] - to display text in a more elegant fashion, it is preferable because the all caps thing is so bizarre, like this plain text attempt to erect this statuesque & glaring twentieth-century-fox-logo lettering that impresses the weight of a film on casual readers, this awkward tone shift in which civility buckles under the weight of an uncontrolled outburst, "my favourite welles picture? i'd have to say THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS", really just best to apply basic title case formatting to make it look more reasonable than reflexive all caps look, here let me just test it, http://img.bhs4.com/FD/7/FD78B20A162DC47709289F54C7BDA3921E31ABF2_large.jpg

'Closed system' vs 'open system' is just another way of re-stating Barthes' distinction between 'writerly' and 'readerly' texts, no? (ie the open, readerly text is polysemic and only completed by its interaction with the reader, whereas the closed, writerly text is complete unto itself and provides its own critique). But I think it would be dishonest of Haynes, or other filmmakers of his generation and after, to pretend that they haven't ever encountered film theory at all, or that theories about the gaze, identification etc etc aren't sometimes relevant to their work. If Haynes' films are closed systems because they "provide their own interpretive apparatus" - well, isn't that a failure of criticism, or at least a challenge to it - there are always new things to be said.

let's not

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Thursday, December 10, 2015 11:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hey morbs good news: http://kottke.org/15/12/happiness-doesnt-help-you-live-longer

btw i didn't mean it was a completely closed system (which couldn't really exist) just that it kind of tended that way

The weakness of this closed/open distinction is that it clearly favours the open text over the closed one - but there are plenty of closed texts that give great pleasure (ie most of Kubrick's films)

ilx: cheaper bullshit than grad school

This isn't a language I speak, but I'm always fascinated to read it.

In other words, whilst open and closed systems are commonly used frameworks for identifying structural relationships and characteristics, we can tend to find asymptotic trade offs in variables and dynamics that introduce instability and complexity - unless we're prepared to make more restrictive and heroic assumptions.

I'm not sure what I think about this over all (I think it's underpowered and overpowered) but I do think the best thing about it is Sarah Paulson's incredible performance as Carol's ex lover and confidant. She's so good in this that I she makes the rest of it seem so fake -"who is this actress?!" and after googling I realised that she was also the one that made 12 Years A Slave convincing. Chalk me up as a Sarah Paulson Stan. The way she fidgets with her cigarette as she talks with Carol justifies the whole film IMO.

Sorry I edited that into confusion. There's a rogue "I"

And then later she does the same fiddling cigarette action while talking to Therese. Like those visual motifs, Haynes likes to repeatedly deploy a good thing.

I like it a lot (want to re-read her book, remember it being underwhelmed - then again it came after I read a bunch of other awesome fiction by her and couldn't deal with the one-offness and ii) its not for me anyway) although its more of a move sideways from Far From Heaven. Haynes is in a difficult situation. It seems he is putting things more in the open - he is making these films w/out the restrictions on Sirk - but also being bound by the time they are set in, so avoiding a more confrontational approach (Fassbinder mode). This open 50s movie is something I found to be a tad unsatisfying.

Blanchett is the best face in anglo cinema since Weisz in Deep Blue Sea. Give it to me.

does blanchett do more than one face in this film?

It's more like a mask.

As a character Carol is one-dimensional so no need for more than one face - and, who needs more, as long as its Cate Blanchett's face.

i think she had so little to work with as a character (unless you count looking haughty/majesterial/imperious for 90% of the film) she just looked like what a character in the 50s might have looked like had she received an early trial of botox.

Amazing movie. The best I've seen all year. Absolutely gorgeous, devastating, beautiful...

I adored this.

6/10...Nice photography, but to score higher both Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara both needed to show they are capable of more than a single expression. And would it have hurt for there to be a bit more sense of enjoyment?

I thought that tension was one of the best parts of the movie...everyone is so uptight, so 1952...a forbidden love! made sense everyone was stone faced

particular years are actually not that uptight.

My take.

oh you know what i mean...that err uh, era!

i was surprised at how much i liked this

it didn't seem particularly dissatisfying or emotionally unavailable to me, rooney mara definitely has more than one expression, but the most expressive things in the movie are the touches, which are all incredibly weighted, and i thought that was conveyed really well. i also liked the grain; everyone seemed to be radiating their own internal static

this was lovely.

i really liked this! it felt a lot more humanized to me than safe or ffh, like haynes has mellowed out just a little bit. all the main performances were strong, mara especially so. if it had a shred of humor anywhere it would be even better.

I feel like Kyle chandler (Harge) and Sarah Paulson (Abby) made this enjoyable in parts. It's so highly rated by people I respect that I feel silly for finding it v dull overall.

what the hell names are harge and rindi?

I liked this, less than mildred pierce, but its p good

This was basically Far From Heaven all over again for me: gorgeously detailed (I was reminded of The Master more than once) but kind of a dirge; why doesn't Haynes remember that the 50s melodramas he's aping were, for all of their luxuriating in Emotion, still tightly paced? I liked Paulson and Chandler better than the leads (Eric OTM upthread about the film's remarkable sympathy for his character), though Blanchett's meeting with her husband and their lawyers was beautifully written ("we're not ugly people") and performed. I was baffled by Carrie Brownstein getting such considerable billing for what amounted to a blink-and-miss-it cameo until I remembered that Portlandia was a thing.

Paulson and Chandler were the best things about this, without a doubt. I realise this what Haynes was going for but the whole thing is so underpowered. Passionless.

why doesn't Haynes remember that the 50s melodramas he's aping were, for all of their luxuriating in Emotion, still tightly paced?

i don't recall far from heaven being all that langorously (sp?) paced, but i do know what you mean. filmmakers who swear by classical hollywood often imitate the /mood/ but too often, by design or neglect, forget the narrative form.

I thought this film was probably better than Far From Heaven, not nearly as good as Safe which remains his best film for me, and which I rewatched shortly before seeing this and it floored me. I find the axes around which discussion of this film is polarised (in reviews and elsewhere, not necessarily on ilx) really dull and beside the point.

I think polarisation can be summarised roughly:

-Whether or not it reproduces only the most staid and bland elements of Sirk. (Haynes has lost the Fassbinder spirit and is content to revel in the most superficial fetishism of 1950s repression and Mid-Century Modern design)

-Whether or not the film’s superficiality (its perceived hammy acting/ its over-confected art direction) papers over a hollow centre or if the film (just like 1950s repressive society!) buries a wounded core underneath its formal rigidity.

In other words, and its a question that always seems to hover over Sirk and anything that plays obvious tribute to his films, is this melodrama or melodrama? And in the case of Haynes in particular this question is overly mired in a *very* 90s queer theory concern with the performance of identity and ambiguous depictions of non-normative sexuality in pre-liberation cultural products etc etc etc. (the Armond White review is particularly focussed on this aspect of the film)

This is all of course part of the film, and it would be daft to pretend that they aren’t but for me the film was much more interesting as (the Frank Rich review says) its very lesbian content.

Now I have not read the book, I’m not sure how faithful it is to the book and if it deviates from the book, where it deviates, although having seen the film, for many of the reasons that I found the film interesting, I am keen to read the book. It also means that many of the things I found interesting about the film are of course straightforwardly adapted from the book, but I am not making that distinction at present.

FROM THIS POINT ON I GIVE AWAY LOTS OF PLOT DETAILS

The film’s depiction of lesbian worlds felt very exciting, especially as lesbian cultural history is still much more occluded than gay history, especially of this period.. What I found particularly notable is how close to the surface of their world this lesbian culture is shown as being. When Therese’s boyfriend finds out about the affair with Carol, he doesn’t seem so fazed, its clear that Carol’s sexuality is a problem that is known about by her husband’s family and their frankness about it is very interesting. It is clear in this film that gay lives at this time were not as unimaginable as they are in more hysterical depictions. The conversations between Carol and her friend that reveal a highly networked world of vampy suburban lesbians with perfectly applied lipstick. The the much more overtly Sirk-derived world that Julianne Moore lives in in Far From Heaven, the characters in Carol seem to inhabit a historical moment that is situated on a continuum. The fact that Carol is such a well connected lesbian implies to me that these connections were formed and solidified during World War II and have to to do with the greater freedoms enjoyed by women, especially concerning their sexuality, to which the conservatism of the 1950s was a reactionary response. At the end of the film, you can imagine Carol and Therese living in the West Village and hosting lesbian supperclubs in 1963. The imagining of the 1950s is not as shorn up and airless as many of the reviews seem to imply.

I also thought the Saul Leiter homage was good and interesting and helped explore the films themes, aside from any sophomoric nonsense about “fractured identities.” To me it seemed obvious that this blurry world, semi-occluded and refracted through the windows of shopfronts and cars, is seeing through Therese’s eyes. She is a photographer and a novice in this lesbian social world which is not immediately available to the gaze, the fabulous butches in the record shop notwithstanding. Everything is half-glimpsed, half known, and the idea that records, gloves, cigarettes can instantly become part of this lesbian world of circulating desire is very different from how gay films can make a very easy analogy between the scopophilic cinema gaze and desirous cruising glances.