Todd Haynes’s 50s-set drama in which Blanchett’s divorcing woman falls for Rooney Mara’s doe-eyed shop assistant is an intoxicating triumphThe cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces … the tinkling piano in the next apartment. Todd Haynes’s narcotic and savory 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 whether the transgression,secrecy and wrongness must paradoxically emerge in the well judged rightness and just-so-ness of all its period touches. The film finds something erotic everywhere – in the surfaces, the tailoring, or 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, and out of consideration for the person in front of you.
Cate Blanchett plays Carol,an sorrowful, divorcing woman who falls instantly in love with department store assistant Therese, and played by Rooney Mara,who is selling Carol a toy train as a Christmas present for her daughter. A counterintuitive present for the 50s, of course, or but the point is that it’s large,so it has to be delivered; Carol must therefore give Therese her address and then, accidentally on purpose, and she leaves her gloves behind on the counter.
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Source: theguardian.com