Carol

Few contemporary films have evoked time and place as brilliantly as Todd Haynes' 2015 drama CAROL.  So authentic seeming is this film that had it not been for the credits I might've believed it was filmed in early 1950s NYC.  For me, getting the atmosphere right is the very foundation for greatness in film, for involvement in the artifice. I have to believe the illusion, to forget the crew just out of frame, especially in a story such as this, one that involves the love between two women in a society dominated by men and their ideas of morality and propriety.  One firmly rooted in that perpetuated notion of the perfect, spotless nuclear family.  One in which the cracks only continue to reveal themselves to this very day.

Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) is a glamorous but saddened woman who is weathering the early stages of a separation.  A light appears one day in the form of Therese (Rooney Mara), a young department store clerk with whom Carol has an immediate rapport.  The feelings are mutual.  Therese has a boyfriend who is eager for marriage but she is unsure.  The two women correspond, then meet, with an unfortunate outcome.  But later, Carol invites Therese on a road trip. The relationship blossoms, revealing perhaps a deep love, one to be consummated.

Haynes' approach to this material is sensitive and surefooted.  His films treat homosexuals and their longings tastefully and artfully.  The inevitable opposition is not presented broadly, even as the director paid homage to Douglas Sirk with 2002's FAR FROM HEAVEN, another film dealing with sexual orientation in the 1950s.  The aforementioned attention to period detail makes CAROL a pleasure aesthetically as well as thematically, and Haynes' direction eschews predictability at nearly every opportunity.  This is represented by something as simple as not showing someone's facial reaction to a dramatic departure, but rather framing them from behind, as they listlessly pursue. 

CAROL is nearly unthinkable without Blanchett and Mara, who are both sublime.  Their chemistry is quiet yet urgent, and how their story is told is as beautifully rendered as most anything I've seen lately.