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

I will have to chalk this up as a disappointment; it's frequently hollow beneath the impeccable art direction and midcentury-photo-style color. (Flaws I generally didn't find in Far From Heaven or Mildred Pierce.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=679wr31SXWk

You'll never guess who didn't like it

but i don't believe he's ever liked Haynes.

I wanted dissent; my colleagues here were fanning themselves after swooning last week. I haven't watched it yet.

I will have to chalk this up as a disappointment; it's frequently hollow beneath the impeccable art direction and midcentury-photo-style color.

everything i've seen/read about this (including interview with lachmann and haynes in american cinematographer this week) makes it seem kind of decorous along the lines you describe. but i'll give it a shot!

"frequently hollow beneath the art direction" = def Far From Heaven.

i'd say that characterizes the dylan movie too, even more so actually.

in the AC article lachmann and haynes talk about coming up w/ a "visual strategy" of shooting through lots of windows, scrims, curtains, into mirrors, etc., in order to evoke the characters' "fractured identites" or some such. and while both lachmann and haynes are very smart (much smarter than me) and the former is one of the greatest cinematographers working, i had to think, "good grief, really?"

but the proof will be in the puddin

They wish they knew how to quit each other

i have to admit, though, that i was intrigued when lachmann discussed the scene where blanchett serenades mara with an acoustic cover of "dip it low".

I'm the exact opposite. This is the movie I wish Far From Heaven had been.

It didn't bother me how obvious the compositions are meant to evoke their isolated existence. I wish more gay movies had lines as woundingly resonant as "I never looked like this."

can't really write at length at the mo but there's a real uncanniness to the visuals in this, not in a good way; a bunch - like a bunch - of the compositions seem to be specifically referential to some saul leiter photographs, cf the windows & reflections, these obviously beautiful pictures but a weirdly au courant lens into the period; & there are also just weird technical lapses that remind you you aren't watching something as period as it's striving to be, like underexposed interiors & blown-out landscape shots. my friend wasn't into it & described it as "two grainy hours".

i liked this a bunch for the first while because of cate blanchett's laser eyes but wish it could have been a little more modern in communicating the characters' feelings. it reminded me a lot of tsai's what time is it there?

also: lol kyle chandler

When was the last time the Kyle Chandler character in this type of movie wasn't merely sympathetic but also arguably the most hurt person in the whole film?

Saw this yesterday here in London where it's gained 5 star mega-reviews.

I had a fear it would be worthy and dull, and it didn't disappoint on that score. Actually, the main disappointment for me was the performances of the two main leads, which was awful - though no doubt they followed the direction to the letter. Cate Blanchette was completely over-theatrical, mannered and melodramatic, and Rooney Mara a timid unsmiling mouse ("Take me to bed!").

Having said that, I did quite enjoy the overall look and photography, - so it had some compensations but was still a bit of a slog.

"frequently hollow beneath the art direction" = def Far From Heaven.

No, I didn't say "actually better than most Sirk materpieces." *ducks*

"two grainy hours".

It was shot on Super 16 (which i didn't know existed).

K Uhlich otm here:

Of course there will be the slightly academic appropriations of Sirk and Fassbinder. But now there’s also a square respectability to his approach that I find deflating. I wish these recent women’s melodramas had more of the pranksterish qualities (in abstract) of his earlier work.... Blanchett and Mara have a good rapport that never pierced me emotionally.

http://www.keithuhlich.com/2015/09/immediate-impressions-nyff-2015-carol.html

*ducks*

How about *exits*?

"His later, established work is not as good as earlier, edgier work"

https://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzbvas2HOr1r6knzpo1_500.gif

i will at some point post the Kent Jones piece on Sirk in FC from earlier this year, where he suggests that Sirkians really must come to grips with the elements of his films that are bad.

It was shot on Super 16 (which i didn't know existed).

moonrise kingdom was also shot on super 16mm . it's a very nice format!

xp I think the entire line of serious critical thinking on Sirk has, from the beginning, stressed that he was transcending the elements of his films that were bad. (Not a line of thinking I'm on board with, obviously, because de gustibus non est disputandum et al.)

I've made my peace with the poorly conceived sections of his films. I turn ATHA off after the natural ending: Jane Wyman interred in plush carpet hell with her teevee.

oh that's perverse...

KJB and i saw Carol yesterday and he suggested some of Blanchett's mannerisms were reminiscent of Dunaway as Crawford.

(i myself thought CB tossed her head a little too often)

I'll admit that much of my initial wincing comes from the usual crowing over Ms. Flibbity Gibbet's performance.

Does she throw back vodka martinis with a trembling wrist?

there's lots of smoking she gets to fully fly with, of course

p good Frank Rich piece, mostly for the Highsmith stuff

http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/frank-rich-carol-invisibility-of-lesbian-culture.html#

I don't know about 'shallow', but this film is definitely about 'the look', and so consequently about surfaces, and things that are hidden beneath surfaces. By 'The look' I mean not only the decor, cinematography, set dressing, location shooting and especially Sandy Powell's ravishing costume design, but also all the coded glances in the film - the way that gay men and women in the 1950s had to instantly evaluate the other as potential lover, or potential threat (the film is possibly too cool for Highsmith, but it does retain a feeling of menace, of collapse - of the unified self, or the well-ordered life - lurking just around the corner.) So yes, there is a lot of shooting through windows, into mirrors, and so on, but it seems an entirely apposite 'visual strategy' when you're making a film about the way that society (and more pointedly, masculine society) keeps people apart, prisoners of history punished for desire.

It's a great film, imho.

Was just coming here to post this puff-piece on the fashion of it.

i thought that kent jones piece on sirk was rather incoherent; not one of KJ's better essays. i'm not sure what he was driving at except for the truism that an orthodox auteurism will sometimes blind folks to the flaws in director's films. that's not a new observation and i'm not sure what the stakes are when it comes to sirk.

the bigger problem is that "flaws" are in the eyes of the beholder and kent's piece was just too scattered for me to be convinced that what he perceived as flaws were actually such. i think the ending of "there's always tomorrow" is quite credible and convincing, and the feeling of lost opportunity lingers pretty strongly even through the nominally happy ending. i don't think that's reading against the grain; it's just present in the film.

interesting (?) phenomenon of gay directors who make somewhat subversive, formally adventurous early films settling into something like a dull, lacquered prestige cinema in their dotage. (thinking of haynes and terence davies, but maybe also gus van sant in his own way).

you could put a positive spin on this and say it mirrors the mainstreaming or acceptance of gays and gay culture, but that's probably reaching too far.

although with haynes even the 'subversive' material is left-correct in a way that always felt (to me) like he was hedging his bets.

interesting (?) phenomenon of gay directors who make somewhat subversive, formally adventurous early films settling into something like a dull, lacquered prestige cinema in their dotage. (thinking of haynes and terence davies, but maybe also gus van sant in his own way).

You don't need "gay" in that sentence. Ozon and Apichatpong skewer that argument, no? Ozon's recent The New Girlfriend is his most playful and subversive in years, I think.

I know you don't mean it, but your implication is that gay directors have a stronger obligation to subvert.

I need to read the novel. I've read Ripley's Game and A Dog's Ransom in the last month, impressed with their sour brevity, disappointed by how this sour surface hints at tensions that Highsmith isn't willing to suss out. She reminds me of that line of Oscar Wilde: Henry James is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. That's how she strikes me in relation to Bernanos.

GVS has for his whole career gone back and forth between formally adventurous and dull prestige.

or a la Last Days, formally dull

now he's formerly dull

Mildred Pierce had some of Haynes' best work.

yeah, it was a flaky thought.

the only GVS feature i really like is mala noche (cue indie rock guy: "I like their early stuff"). his arty, formalist films aren't any better -- and in some cases significantly worse -- than his more populist stuff.

(i mean, my thought about gay directors was flaky.)

Don't sell yourself short.

interesting (?) phenomenon of gay directors who make somewhat subversive, formally adventurous early films

This is fairly well known (?)

i really lost faith in Cocteau when he teamed up with Danny Kaye

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

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.

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.

saw this for the first time tonight and loved it. the story is so beautifully understated: the glances, furtive touches — there is a mystery to their relationship that is true to life, and the camerawork with all of the mirror shots, shots through glass, etc I think is meant to help convey that. how better to convey the frisson of love, let alone forbidden love? I lost it when carol told therese she loved her. brody’s review linked above nails this I think.

with TÁR in mind, blanchette has an incredible knack for playing problematic lesbians.

Because it's you, I'm watching it again. Still haven't tried creamed spinach and poached eggs, but I did mix a martini.