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

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.

Look At This Japanese Collector's Set:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81JKNhsq2vL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

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.

I read somewhere that her part got cut down significantly when Haynes restructured the film in post. The party sequence was originally going to be a framing device spread out over the whole film, with Brownstein's character figuring in heavily. Most of her scenes ended up being cut, but they were still contractually obligated to give her featured billing.

I totally forgot she was in this. Looking forward to watching this during the holidays.

a really beautiful looking film.

I finally saw this for the first time this year and loved it. But...Rooney Mara (and the other Mara) are seriously miscast in everything.

She may be good in a peloton ad.

Even more luxuriousness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WkFSpgezec

It doesn't come with poached eggs, creamed spinach, and a shaker of martinis

My wife and I watched this last night on DVD. We noted the irony of it being released by The Weinstein Company with Harvey credited as an Executive Producer.

When it was over we both agreed that the story had tremendous potential power, but at every turn the director chose the easiest, most reductive and superficial path to tell the story of his characters. The acting was meant to be subtle, but often strayed over the boundary into stasis. The costumes shouted 1950s glamour as loudly as possible, but costumes and hairstyles are, at best, enhancements to telling a story, not a substitute for one. Even the music was a bland rehash of every movie music cliché. Tbf, the cinematography was mostly decent.

If the point of all this was to convey a sense of the suffocation of his characters' lives then Haynes misunderstood his means for his end and wound up suffocating their story instead.

Didn't have that reaction at all. Maybe seeing it in a theater made the difference for me. I thought that the story was beautifully told and that the acting was great. The grainy 16 mm print on a big screen felt electric to me. And I thought Carter Burwell's score was restrained and perfect.

To me Carol is easily one of the best films of the last 10 years

ok, i see I made my crit clear about the Mara sisters already. just no. They deaden all films.

I agree with Aimless here, while I legit consider Haynes a hero this film was so nothing, to me. I often think of a comment that an ILXor, maybe it was Vegemite girl, maybe not, made re: Mad Men that it was so laconic it was like they didn't even realise they were making a TV show that people would invest in - wildly paraphrasing there but the comment stuck with me and I often think about it w/r/t this film which obv. works on details but is underpowered to the point that it drives me mad with it's pointlessness.

but this, basically

If the point of all this was to convey a sense of the suffocation of his characters' lives then Haynes misunderstood his means for his end and wound up suffocating their story instead.

i want to think this could be an entirely different, better film with another lead. or a choice not to let them be an uncharismatic, blank slate, any woman.

there's a kind of surface ≥ feeling which I can get behind generally but not here. There's a scene in which Carol is putting on nail varnish wich Haynes obviously is very invested in.

i want to think this could be an entirely different, better film with another lead. or a choice not to let them be an uncharismatic, blank slate, any woman.

see i like mara in the role for just that reason - the character is an unformed person. A performer who was doing a lot of interesting & charismatic Acting would have undermined the whole premise imo

I thought Mara’s Therese was kind of a cipher at first and I was interested that he interpreted the characters from the novel in the way he did, with such an extreme imbalance between them in both personality and power.

I know relationships like that though, with power and benevolence shifting as the relationship progresses. I thought it was really moving

and I thought Rooney Mara was great in the end

well, it was the poolboy but instead the shopgirl. And the shopgirl was not interesting either.

lol

yeah i didn't find any part of this film that needed to be predicated on that character being interesting. probably the opposite. i had never really had a good haynes experience but i liked this a lot when i saw it.

I'm still ambivalent (link above) but the performers are fine.

And y'all need to try creamed spinach and poached eggs with an ice-cold martini.

ohhh i see there is a velvet goldmine doc.

"What a strange girl you are. Flung out of space"

Are we to think that lesbians are strange and flung out of space?

i didn't find any part of this film that needed to be predicated on that character being interesting

That is a highly peculiar view. Given this, where did the interest in this film lie for you? In the filmic technicalities or in some element that illuminated the lives of the entirely uninteresting characters? Because, if it is the latter, then it seems to me you found something of interest about the characters. If it is the former, then fine, but a deep appreciation of filmic technicalities is not the sort of audience response that most directors or audiences would consider as indicating a successful film.

Individuals don’t have to be interesting for their stories to be interesting. Hardly anyone is interesting.

So what was interesting for you?

"Are we to think that lesbians are strange and flung out of space?"

What?? It was a memorable line of dialogue from the film

"In the filmic technicalities or in some element that illuminated the lives of the entirely uninteresting characters?"

they weren't uninteresting to me

not going to argue anymore about this

Observing characters that seem like real humans living their human lives can be interesting, even if those characters themselves as individuals are not “interesting people”, like if you met them at a party or whatever. It’s one of the main reasons to watch movies imo. Ymmv I guess but that character and Mara’s performance felt truthful to me, which can be enough for a movie. Maybe it would be more interesting if she were a secret agent or something but idk.

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.