Review of Carol (2015) by Rachel B — 16 Feb 2016

?CAROL? SNUBBED AT BAFTA?S.

Good fairy and peripatetic emcee, Stephen Fry, speaking at the 2016 BAFTA?S, described the movie, ?CAROL?, as a 1950?s story of a New York woman, who goes to a department store to buy a train set and comes away with a train set plus shopgirl thrown in.

He added that HE generally finds his shop assistants on the internet.

It seems, in relation to ?CAROL?, that Stephen and I saw a different movie ? or perhaps it was the same movie seen from different vantage points, he being very tall and beloved, and I being very short and not in the slightest bit tolerated.

In any case, the movie I saw, coincidentally also called ?CAROL? [a hard, unsympathetic name, I?ve always thought] was about a woman who loved her daughter so much she wouldn?t let her be held to ransom in a vicious morals based divorce case, but, rather let the young child go, realising that, to be true to her own nature and to go with, and not against her own grain, would provide that daughter with a potent moral example of what a woman and mother could and should be in the twentieth century and beyond.

I must admit ?CAROL? was a bitter pill for me to swallow ? for largely personal reasons.

More than one quarter of a century after this film is set, a woman I had once been close to, as close as a socialite and a shopgirl, lost custody of her four children in a similar sexuality based custody case, in Queensland, Australia ? she, living at the time openly with a woman, and her former husband, who brought the custody case, having ?found religion? and a naïve new wife, whilst, on the sly, maintaining his own boyfriend in a flat attached to his family home.

I don?t like being reminded of feeling like a shopgirl, nor of how far some people will go in order to win ? hence my reluctance to see the movie.

But, that?s not the fault of ?Carol?, a film that has spent far too long in coming to our screens.

?Carol? started as a 1952 Patricia Highsmith book, ?The Price of Salt?, a bestseller that was ahead of its time. The film seems now to stand accused of being a bit behind the times - its script, written by the wonderful, and succinct, Phyllis Nagy, having been circling LAX in a holding pattern for the better part of 20 years.

Personally, I don?t have a prejudice against ?Period? films, especially the period 1952, my birth year ? in my experience, people don?t change, only costumes do, and even costumes get recycled, Just ask ANGELS Costumiers.

Neither do I have a prejudice against Queer cinema ? why would I not want to see stories which reflect my own life experience, even if poor scripting, B grade actors and dodgy production values have often made me squirm in my cinema stall. Heck, as a woman, and a lesbian, I?ve had a lifetime of paying more for second rate product and service, for which I?m expected to turn myself inside out with gratitude.

I stress that, in my opinion, ?Carol? DOES NOT fall into this category, nor does anyone associated with this film.

Some opinion has it that ?Carol? is a cold and inaccessible film. It has been said that the film, along with Queer cinema generally, employs some Queer subdialect that makes it inaccessible, and thus unsympathetic, to outsiders. And that?s clearly our fault, as Queer filmmakers.

I don?t sympathise with this viewpoint. Though I do agree with the Australian Poet, Dorothy Porter, author of ?The Monkey?s Mask? ? book and movie- who once said that we LGBTI people are different, are not the same, it?s not as if we Queers are talking, writing and filming in cuneiform - we all use Lingua Franca.

If you don?t get it, think Marcel Marceau, and, viewer/critic, take personal responsibility for your own lack of sympathy and engagement.

{Some 15 years ago, I was standing in a queue at my suburban Bank, waiting for the Teller. The young man in front of me was regaling the teller, also a young man, with a tale of disturbing developments in his workplace. He told him of possible retrenchments. Indeed, he said, one woman had been retrenched already. Just when the Teller murmured a sympathetic response, the customer added ? ?Yea, she was retrenched, but it doesn?t matter, she was only a dyke.? - Someone whose life, and tale, obviously didn?t matter.].

?Carol? is an uncommon Christmas Tale, and, unlike a Christmas cake, parts of it may be difficult to swallow and even harder to digest.

The success of its transformation from a 1952 book to a 2015 film depends largely on the strength of casting, and the uncommon talents of the women who play Terese Belavit and Carol Aird., and both of these actors have been much nominated but barely gonged for their roles in this movie.

The wide-eyed, super engaging Rooney Mara, who put in such a ballsy performance [can we still say, ?ballsy?] in ?The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? did not disappoint me as a girl on the cusp, and must be a shoo in for the lead in any future Audrey Hepburn biopic.

And then, there?s Cate Blanchet, who has been previously directed by ?Carol? Director, Todd Haynes in the movie, ?I?m Not There?, a rumination on the life of Bob Dylan. Todd Haynes, perceptively, said that he had directed Cate Blanchet in the role of a man, and , in ?Carol?, he looked forward to seeing if she could play a woman.

Now, Cate Blanchet is not an actor whose career I have followed with great attention or passion. Prior to ?Carol?, I confess the only image I retained of her in the midground of my mind was a glimpse of her prosthetic elfin ears as Queen Galadriel.

I guess her beauty, bearing, and intelligence must have registered somewhere in the back of my mind, but in an attenuated form, like light from a long gone supernova, registered by radiotelescope and explicated and argued over by unknown academics in abstruse equations.

But, I gritted my teeth, paid my dues [Gold Class], to sit and see, in a revamped Cinema that was once my second home as a 20 year old, the Village Twin, New Farm, Brisbane, still just down the road from where my grandmother lived and died.

I went out of my front door to look at a movie, much as I occasionally walk out of my front door to look at the night sky above my farm, expecting to see familiar stars in familiar places, predictable Venus, Orion?s Belt, and expecting nothing much and nothing more after a lifetime of snubs the like of which you could not conceive.

And, expecting nothing, unexpectedly saw in Carol Aird?s hooded eyes, in Cate Blanchet?s hooded eyes , the dark matter that holds our universe together.

From Anna Cameron of Monsters of Ingratitude.