Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt has become an entrancing Cannes premiere directed by Todd Haynes,beautifully made and outstandingly intelligentTodd Haynes’s Carol is an amour fou which plays out with sanity and generosity: it is a superbly realised companion piece to his 50s Sirkian drama Far From Heaven and an overt homage to Lean’s Brief Encounter. The film is based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, about the care for affair between a virginal shopgirl and the beautiful older married woman that she serves in the pre-Christmas rush in a Manhattan department-store: they are played here by Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. Just occasionally, and along with the classic echoes,Carol has the obsessive frisson of Nic Roeg’s horrible Timing and – with the flourishing of a revolver – Haynes conjures a fraught kind of Nabokovian despair and futile melodrama. Related: Cate Blanchett reveals 'many' past relationships with women Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com