I wanted to beat it with a stick and cry, ‘Get on with it!’: Carol reviewed

Carol is an easy film to admire — so beautiful to look at; entirely exquisite — but such a hard film to feel anything for. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian novel The Price of Salt, this is a love story that, here, doesn’t venture below the waist, literally, emotionally or metaphorically. It glides across its own glittering surfaces, never investigating what may lie beneath, and playing restraint to the point of inertia. Its director, Todd Haynes, has spoken about how hard it was to make a Hollywood film about two women, starring two women, so I feel bad delivering the news, but deliver it I must: what was taboo in ’52 may not be that exciting today.

Set in 1950s New York, and with costumes (by Sandy Powell) and mis-en-scène to die for, come back to life, and die for all over again — the furs!; the hats!; the shiny, gunmetal Packards! — this follows the ‘forbidden romance’ between Carol (Cate Blanchett) and Therese (Rooney Mara). Carol is the older. Carol is wealthy, in the midst of a divorce, and has a little daughter, Rindy. (Rindy? Rooney? Each to their own, I suppose.) Therese is in her twenties and works in a Manhattan department store. They meet in the run-up to Christmas, when Carol arrives at the store to buy Rindy a particular doll but, having sold out of that doll, Therese advises a train set, and their eyes lock. Carol purchases the train set and I did want to know what Rindy thought of it, having been expecting a doll, but we never find out. Perhaps they are saving that for Carol 2: The Slog Continues.