Oh Carol...I'm in love with you

Rooney Mara (l) and Cate Blanchett in Carol

If the past genuinely is a foreign country then it is one in which Todd Haynes has permanent residency. His majestic new film, Carol, completes a loose trilogy of sorts which began with his Douglas Sirk homages in Far From Heaven and his mini-series Mildred Pierce.

Haynes is a director out of his time; he seems most perfectly at home in the world of the Forties and Fifties. It’s a world in which, cinematically at least, women could be strong but had to pay a price for it as both Julianne Moore and Kate Winslet did in his previous two works.

Carol is set in 1952 and features not one but two strong women. Cate Blanchett is the titular character, a New York socialite whose marriage is foundering as a consequence of the closeness of her relationship with a female friend. Her outraged husband, played by Kyle Chandler, loves her but cannot come to terms with her lifestyle.

A shopping trip to a department store becomes a life-changing event. Carol meets Therese, a photographer working part time in the toy department. Therese is immediately taken by the composure and poise of the sophisticated Carol.

Although she is pursued by not one but two men Therese is not convinced that the conventional life is for her. There is something alluring about Carol and a lunch date quickly turns into a full blown, if initially hesitant, relationship. On a subsequent road trip, Carol and Therese bond emotionally and physically and both reach decisions with irrevocable consequences.

Haynes tells us his story largely in flashback. We begin when Carol and Therese are discovered having drinks in a Manhattan hotel and the story largely emerges through Therese’s reverie. Haynes has a neat artistic device here; in most of the scenes that prompt the reverie Therese is obscured by the fog on a window and other tricks. The idea is that it is only at the end when she realises what has to be done that we and she see clearly.

The cinematography throughout, from Haynes’ frequent collaborator Edward Lachman, is wonderful. It begins, pinched and washed out, as though it was shot on the Eastman stock of the period but as the film develops and the characters are fleshed out the images and the colour palette open out with them.

Rooney Mara is wonderfully enigmatic as Therese, a character described as ‘flung from space’ and Cate Blanchett gives the performance of her career in the title role. I have never been a Blanchett fan, she is too brittle for my taste normally, but there is warmth and maturity about the characterisation here which makes her utterly believable.

The film, it has to be said, is impeccably cast. Kyle Chandler is terrific as Carol’s bewildered husband, as is Sarah Paulson as her dearest friend, lover, and confidante.

Although it is set at a time when a gay love story would have been shocking, this film benefits from its 21^st century perspective. There is no sense of prurience here, there is instead a sense of a love not that dare not speak its name so much as one that simply chooses not to.

Carol is a poignant and compelling story of moods and silences with one of the most satisfying endings I have come across for a while, and all the better for being totally and completely earned. Haynes is not a man who deals in unearned sentiment. In Carol there is a price to be paid but the wonder of the story is that these women are prepared to pay it and thus they avoid victimhood.

And since his next film is about Peggy Lee, I guess Todd Haynes will be sticking around in the past for a little while to come. That can only be good news.