It makes a big difference where you sit. I first saw Todd Haynes’s “Carol” from the back of a big hall (at its New York Film Festival première) and was struck by the expressive power of its colors, the sensual flair of its visual compositions. But the images didn’t so much arouse emotions as signify them. The romantic drama of two women who meet in New York in 1952—Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a somewhat distracted, inexperienced nineteen-year-old who has never had a lesbian relationship, and Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a wealthy, married suburbanite who has lesbian affairs—appeared, from afar, to be more of an idea and even an ideal than an experience.
On that first viewing, Haynes—working with the great cinematographer Ed Lachman, who seems to have poured a lifetime of inventive ingenuity into the film—appeared to preserve the movie’s emotional world in its images rather than to embody it. But up close, six weeks later, in the second row of a compact theatre, Haynes’s fundamental artistic decisions struck the eye like a flash. With the nose pressed against the screen, it’s obvious from the very start of the movie, even under the credits (a shot of a sewer grating that fills the screen with more darkness than light), that it was shot on grainy, 16-mm. film, and this grain is no mere accident but an essential quality of Haynes’s world.
I’m not among the viewers who obsesses about the physical medium on which a movie is made or the circumstances under which a movie is viewed. The circumstances make a difference, but no one of them has priority over another—a screening of a print, a viewing of a DVD on a television or a computer, a streaming video on a playing-card-sized screen, each offers distinctive delights as well as distinctive analytical and experiential possibilities. As for the means of production, what matters is the use that’s made of them. Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan fetishize film but do nothing unusual or original with it, while the most painterly, visually original movie in recent years, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Goodbye to Language,” was shot on video.
The grain in “Carol” matters because Haynes and Lachman force 16-mm. film stock to reveal the extreme range of its expressive possibilities. The viewing of the film becomes a sort of extreme experience, all the more so for its concentration of the movie’s central dramatic elements in its performances and in the composition of its images.
Sitting far back, I saw the artifice in the actresses’ glacial, theatrical precision. Up close, their performances deliver a tremulous, tensile control, a precision that shivers with the passions straining to break out just below the surface—the surface of behavior, the surface of decorum, the surface of the skin. I don’t think that the subcutaneous frissons result from the actors’ performances but, rather, from Haynes’s performance-capture by means of Lachman’s grainy images. They’re not effects of the actors’ skin but of its appearance on the second skin of the film stock (the French word for “film” is “pellicule,” meaning little skin), which lends the actors’ theatricalized immobility an illusion of shivers.
Although Lachman realizes some thrilling, majestic camera movements for Haynes (I’m thinking, in particular, of one in which the camera follows a moving car before rising high overhead as the vehicle moves ahead into the landscape), some of the best and most striking moments in the film are immobile ones. I’m thinking of scenes in which the camera and the actors don’t move but the images are endowed with a sort of internal movement by means of editing and the cinematic thought that it implies. In these scenes, Carol and Therese merely face each other across a table and look at each other. The overwhelming romantic ardor that arises in these moments proves a crucial point in film theory, one that’s too often overlooked by directors and critics alike: the classic pattern of shot and reverse shot, of intercutting between characters who are looking at each other and talking together, isn’t necessarily a mere convenience to insure coverage in dialogue scenes but can be a calculated device of composition as expressive and as exacting as a tense and complex long take.
It’s strange to say about a romantic drama that would stir a heart of stone that its most thrilling element is its grain; it wouldn’t quite be true. The internal, swirling blend of colors within the images—a range of Seurat-like vibrations in motion—gets its impact from the pictorial elements of Haynes’s compositions, from the subjects that give those compositions their identity. The movie’s main visual trope is the shrouded view of characters seen through the glass of car windows and apartment windows that are spattered with raindrops, streaked with reflections of skyglare and streetlights, dimmed by fog, misted by condensation. As the characters are hidden behind these intricate tricks of ordinary optics, their own views outward at the world are equally blocked. The images of “Carol” wrap the two women at its center in a visual cocoon that forces them all the more tightly together as it separates them from all others and all else.
“Carol” features very little skin; its sensuality is textural and architectural, in clothing and fabric, in the squeezed hand on a clothed shoulder, in ardent gazes, furtive glances, and the shape of space that those looks fill with desire. Here, the touch of skin is a delight but it’s not the spark of romance; it’s a consequence, one that the film consistently subordinates to color, shape, stuff, and light. The movie’s film grain melts flesh into light, unifies skin and fabric and light and shadow into a relentless churn of passion.
These misty, abstracted, self-dissolving images seem less a metaphor for the characters’ states of mind than a representation of Haynes’s own vision of romantic agony and ecstasy, his own proudly and artistically editorializing idea of the relationship on-screen. Rather than merely depicting Therese and Carol, Haynes’s images get to the heart of what’s going on between them.
Yet what’s going on between them beside the moody turmoil unleashed by the images is actually very slight. The implications of the relationship are stronger than its substance: Carol is older, witty, pain-laced, refined, accustomed to money and its prerogatives; Therese is young, talented but unsure of her talent, and, with Carol’s encouragement, beginning to realize it. The two women don’t really talk; neither discloses much about family, past, interests, passions, friends, books, politics, movies, the things that people talk about.
As Margaret Talbot wrote in The New Yorker recently, the novel on which “Carol” is based, Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt,” is itself based on Highsmith’s own experiences, as a young woman, with two older women, one of whom was “a wealthy divorcée who bore a resemblance to Katharine Hepburn.” (It’s noteworthy that Blanchett is playing a version of this woman, inasmuch as the actress won her first Oscar for playing—or nearly impersonating—Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator.”) Yet if Carol, in the movie, flaunts a few flashes of worldly wit—albeit without much in the way of worldly knowledge—the nineteen-year-old Therese in the movie gives little hint of being a willfully original and complex creator on the measure of Highsmith herself.
Highsmith’s novel offers a sprinkling of inner detail, of dialogue and letters and internal monologues that emphasize the women’s creative energy and intellectual power. But in the script for “Carol,” written by Phyllis Nagy, neither woman gives a hint of extraordinary character; nothing they say is extraordinary, and this is, I think, by design—because, except for their love, Carol and Therese are fairly ordinary. Carol is extraordinary precisely because she is extraordinary through Therese’s eyes, and vice versa—it’s their love that turns them into characters, that turns their lives into drama. It would be so whether their love were forbidden or merely challenged by the many practical and emotional difficulties that even heterosexual couples of conventional aspiration face. Every love story is the story of a miracle. Every couple’s story is a drama, and I’m a cinematic democrat: I find the depictions of lives and the revelations of people too often written off artistically as ordinary to be the very stuff and essence of art.
But since the obstacles that Carol and Therese face are explicit, cruel, systemic, and unjust, their love requires a special courage, a special daring, a special will. Theirs is a love that should be ordinary and that only the legal and moral prejudices against homosexuality that prevailed in 1952 renders different from other love stories. The two women at the center of “Carol” have their greatness thrust upon them: first, by the sheer power of love, by the greatness that each sees in the other, as all lovers do; and, second, by the circumstances of society, legal and conventional, that turn their ordinary love into an act of bravery and defiance.
Haynes paints the sublimity of the ordinary—of what ought to be the ordinary sublime. The kind of greatness that Carol and Therese have thrust upon them comes at a cost that no one should have to bear; the struggle for happiness is quite enough of a fight even without the fear of prosecution or ostracism. The political essence of “Carol” is that it shouldn’t take any greater measure of courage or heroism for two women or two men to pursue their romance than it would take a heterosexual couple in similar circumstances.
The director exalts romantic ecstasy in images and performances that, though they incarnate the story of Carol and Therese, tell a viewer much more about his own romantic fantasies and desires than about those of his characters. A connoisseur of classic Hollywood cinema, Haynes is piercingly aware of the connection between the oppressions and the injustices that coincided with the forging of its forms. Despite the movie’s (and the novel’s) famously happy ending, Haynes displays, with a critic’s insight, his vision of style and mood as a mask for despair, longing, frustration, and agony.
