Carol

Director; Todd Haynes (UK, USA, Australia). Year of Release: 2015

Manhattan, late 1952. The camera follows a man wearing a trilby and a gabardine mac as he leaves the subway station through the snow. He stops off at a news vendor to buy a newspaper, before entering a restaurant cum tea shop. In the bar, he spies a woman sitting down with a blonde friend. “I haven’t see you in months”, he says, “are you coming to tonight’s party?” The woman equivocates, then says she supposes so. Her companion soon makes an excuse and leaves.

Rewind to a department store. It is Christmas and Therese is behind the toy counter. A blonde customer, who Therese had noticed earlier, asks after a doll which is out of stock. When asked which other dolls she would recommend, Therese admits that she doesn’t know much about dolls, but she is erudite about train sets. The result of this erudition is that the blonde woman, Carol, orders a set. She gives her home address for delivery, and – maybe by design – forgets her gloves.

Therese is in a dissatisfying relationship with Richard, who works for the New York Times and frowns on her having opinions of her own. She would like a career as a photographer, and is clearly talented, but no-one – certainly not Richard – takes her ambitions seriously. Richard believes that they will get married, so that Therese can stay home and have his kids. They are planning to travel through Europe, but he seems much more excited about this than his putative wife.

Carol is blonde, tall, and elegant. In short, she’s Cate Blanchett. She is married to Harge, a business man, but they are swiftly headed towards a divorce. Harge uses their daughter Rindy as a bargaining chip. When he suggests that Carol and Rindy celebrate Christmas at his parents’ house, there is an unspoken threat that Rindy will be going whatever Carol does. Carol’s later decision to invite Therese on a road trip is a break with Harge, but also with her beloved daughter.

Harge is also jealous of Carol’s childhood friend Abby, who regularly provides a shoulder for her friend to cry on. We later learn that Abby is one of Carol’s many previous female lovers, but that the relationship ended a long time ago. Therese, by contrast, is pretty much on her own. Her main reason for sticking with Richard seems to be to stave off the loneliness. Therese is an intelligent and talented woman in a society which is unwilling to accredit working class women as having either,

This means that Therese feels herself unable to find her place in such a society. Carol describes Therese as being “flung out of space”, and indeed there something other worldly about her. She does not seem to belong. Talking about photographing animals, birds and inanimate objects, she tells Carol: “I should be more interested in humans.” And yet, while Carol’s money and social status is able to buy her some room to breathe, Therese is not allowed to express herself.

Each woman sees much more potential excitement and interest the other than in their dead weight partners. A relationship develops which is initially platonic, but no less heart felt for that. Despite the obvious class differences – Carol is much richer, and therefore able to control her destiny a little bit more – the exclusion of women, and particularly of lesbian women, from 1950s USA means that they find some unity in their mutual outsider status.

This is a film where 1950s women make history, but most definitely not in conditions of their own choosing. Half way through the film, we hear the inauguration of Dwight D Eisenhower, and the ability of Carol and Therese to express either themselves or their love is restricted by the times in which they are living. Although I have seen Carol as being described as “not an issues film”, it carries at its hear a deep empathy for lesbians living under Eisenhower liberal Conservatism.

We see this once more towards the end of the film, when the opening scene is repeated – this time from the womens’ perspective. In the opening scene, we expect the man in the trilby and gabardine to become a central character – the camera is following him, after all, and he is a man. But his role is much more minimal, if equally crucial. He is there to break up an intimate conversation between Carol and Therese, who are unable to express their love in public.

I have moaned about several recent films, in which nothing really happens. Not much happens in Carol, either, but it doesn’t happen in such an elegant fashion. There is little action here. We do see a Chekhovian gun, but even this never really goes off. Even the love story is relatively uneventful. We must be an hour into the film before “anything happens”. But this is such an acute depiction of character that none of this matters. We can – and should – enjoy the film for what it is.

One final, more personal, point. Watching Carol evoked old film-going memories in me. In the early 1980s, when I first started going to the cinema regularly, I saw quite a few films starring Patricia Arquette. She wasn’t a favourite actor – I never went to see a film because of her, but she was always reliable, and starred in a number of films which were surprisingly good – John Sayles’s Baby It’s You, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, even Desperately Seeking Susan.

Arquette often played a role that you rarely see nowadays – quirky, not Hollywood beautiful but interesting looking – a romantic lead who you could relate to, and might want to spend time with. Always interesting. I don’t know if it’s just me, but Rooney Mara in Carol looks a lot like Arquette and seems to be playing a similar role. Maybe the films you first saw were always the best, but Carol shows an authenticity that is often lacking in modern film. Go see.