118 mins |
Rated
M (Sex scenes, offensive language & nudity)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Starring Kyle Chandler, Sarah Paulson, Rooney Mara, Carrie Brownstein, Cate Blanchett
he cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces … the tinkling piano in the next apartment. Todd Haynes’s narcotic and delicious film Carol is in love with this kind of detail: the story of a forbidden love affair that makes no apology for always offering up exquisitely observed minutiae from the early 1950s. It is almost as if the transgression, secrecy and wrongness must paradoxically emerge in the well judged rightness and just-so-ness of all its period touches. The movie finds something erotic everywhere – in the surfaces, the tailoring, the furnishing and of course the cigarettes. It revives the lost art of smoking at lunch, smoking with gloves, and the exotic moue of exhaling smoke sideways, out of consideration for the person in front of you....
The film shows us the corsetry and mystery with which gay people in the 1950s could manage their lives with dignity, but it also inhales the clouds of depression and self-control into which Carol has had to retreat and from which she is now defiantly emerging, a prototypical version of Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique, announced over a decade after this. - Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) *****
Read more...
he cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces … the tinkling piano in the next apartment. Todd Haynes’s narcotic and delicious film Carol is in love with this kind of detail: the story of a forbidden love affair that makes no apology for always offering up exquisitely observed minutiae from the early 1950s. It is almost as if the transgression, secrecy and wrongness must paradoxically emerge in the well judged rightness and just-so-ness of all its period touches. The movie finds something erotic everywhere – in the surfaces, the tailoring, the furnishing and of course the cigarettes. It revives the lost art of smoking at lunch, smoking with gloves, and the exotic moue of exhaling smoke sideways, out of consideration for the person in front of you....
The film shows us the corsetry and mystery with which gay people in the 1950s could manage their lives with dignity, but it also inhales the clouds of depression and self-control into which Carol has had to retreat and from which she is now defiantly emerging, a prototypical version of Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique, announced over a decade after this. - Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) *****