A chase film that unfolds with surgical patience, “Carol” (2015) focuses on forbidden lovers restrained by the severe conservatism of the early 1950s. Whereas lesbianism only existed in the interstices of 1950s life, Todd Haynes puts it centerstage in this decadent, nostalgic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 romance novel, “The Price of Salt.”
It is a romance told in hindsight through the sentimental lens of Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), who recalls her brief yet passionate affair with the aristocratic Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett). They meet in Frankenberg’s department store, where Therese sells toys in a Santa hat, mousy and furtive like a guilty elf.
Carol enters draped in fur, wearied by her mortal coil and everyday banality, yet delighting in its accouterments. She spots Therese and they share a gaze that is a fraction of a second too long, too invested, too wanting.
Carol tries to smoke a cigarette, her classic lead on, but Frankenberg’s disallows smoking — and presumably lesbian flirtations. So she wisps her hair to reveal her marble neck, then leaves her lambskin gloves on the counter as her calling card.
Therese takes the bait. The following week they share lunch, Spanish omelettes and martinis à la Carol and consume each other, each one’s eyes lavishing in the spectral beauty of the other’s through the surreal haze of cigarettes. The interaction has the remoteness of an interview, yet Mara and Blanchett charge the air with longing, quietly erupting in blushes and imperceptibly flickering their eyelids.
Haynes adeptly captures their forbidden desire, filming their rendezvous as erotic tension and subtext; dialogue distracts or remains laconic. Instead their love must be subsumed into the erotic extremities of fingertips, concealed by fur coats and leather gloves. Therese and Carol see each other in fetishized fragments, reassembled like Frankenberg’s manikins into lustful, illicit ideals of billowing curls and succubine eyes. Charged by the warmth of Therese’s memory lips redden, eyes intensify and desire burns. The lovers are framed within slivers of doorways so that each meeting becomes a visual tryst, capturing their compunctions in space.
Their romance raises the suspicions of Carol’s husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler) and Therese’s boyfriend, Richard (Jake Lacy). Carol must remain “decent” for her trial concerning the custody of their daughter after Harge accuses her of being an unfit mother, while Therese, already distanced from Richard, merely develops, like the photographs she often takes, into being.
Cinematographer Edward Lachman films Therese through windows and mirrors, refracting and obscuring her until her sexual identity comes into focus. However, Haynes rips the two women apart just as it gets juicy, as if to continue his film’s striptease.
Many will find the film slow or labored because it focuses more on atmosphere than action. Haynes denies our pornographic lust for their consummation through the film’s glacial romantic progression and translates their sexual frustration through repeated deferments. Don’t expect “Blue is the Warmest Color” (2013).
This is a film about foreplay. A caress of the shoulder carries the weight of a first kiss. Locked gazes become a passionate embrace. Merely sharing space becomes transgressively arousing, as if everywhere were a bedroom in which the two lovers can freely undress with eachother their eyes.
The thrill of the chase becomes the thrill of the chaste, as Therese timidly enters the waters of her flowering sexuality guided by Carol’s expert, lambskin-gloved hand.
“Carol” ends perhaps where Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”(1958) begins: lovers locking eyes, wondering if they will spiral further into an impassioned, all-consuming love affair.
“Carol” is playing daily at the Nugget at 4 p.m. and 6:45 p.m.
