A pearl earring pressed up against a rainy window pane. Rolls of old film being developed in a dark room. Carol is a luxuriously tender and slow adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, the story of a love affair between two women in wintery 1950’s New York. It isn’t surprising to learn the film was in production for over 11 years - both the camerawork and actors show beguiling, lingering subtlety.

The film as a whole is given its quality and edge by Cate Blanchett’s magnetic portrayal of Carol, a glamorous married woman whose piercing gaze and drawl seduce the younger shop assistant, Thérèse. Carol makes heads turn as she sweeps through the streets of Manhattan, but it is Thérèse’s eyes which linger longest on her grand fur coats and wine-red nails and lips. Old school romance is part of the film’s charm – lingering touch and perfume make it sensory without being explicitly sexual. And despite a good few references to Brief Encounter, it deftly avoids falling into cliché, mainly because Blanchett’s worldly and self-possessed poise act as a convincing counter-point to Thérèse’s deliberately awkward portrayal by Rooney Mara.

Naming the film Carol after its most central character hints at the narrative obsession which develops around her through Thérèse’s gaze. The girl’s emotions are only vaguely expressed in either her expressions or her speech – she admits with characteristically startled eyes, “I barely even know what to order for lunch.” But when Thérèse starts taking pictures of Carol, albeit from a distance, one flashes back to her previous reluctance to photograph people at all, held back by the fear of being too intimate.

Dialogue in the film is minimal, but because what little is said is so good, the seduction is both gradual and credible, with the sense of wonder each character experiences particularly well expressed by Carol: “What a strange girl you are…. flung into space.” The landscape is one of youthful possibility and imagination – open-top cars, glamorous skyscrapers and Christmas in Manhattan. New York itself is given a pleasingly warm and uplifting quality by the old-fashioned 16mm reel used in filming, and the quaint train sets, dolls and costumes which cavort in and out of focus.

And yet, unhappiness is woven into the very fabric of the film, epitomised by Carol’s simple vocal acknowledgement of a society that proscribes love between two people of the same sex - “it shouldn’t be like this.” As he showed in Stairway to Heaven, Director Todd Hayes knows exactly when to shatter a narrative’s calm contentment and to pick up the pace. Just as Carol threatens to fall into banality, resting on the trope of a younger inexperienced lover being initiated by an older one, the power balance suddenly shifts. Threatened with the removal of her daughter, Carol’s cool composure morphs into teary rage. This opens the way to a deeper complexity of feeling between both characters, heightened by the sense of being hunted and the shift in scene away from New York, to dark motels and diners. For all its leisurely artistry, Carol has an undoubtedly pacey energy about it, starting and ending with the same dinner scene, coming full circle after a tornado of emotions.

Blanchett’s best moment is a speech in which she affirms her lesbian identity to her husband and his lawyers: “I will not negotiate anymore. I want it, and I will not deny it”. Highsmith’s novel was subversive in 1952 because it portrayed same-sex love, but even more so because it did not end in tragedy for its protagonists, and did not seek to punish them. Hayes has harnessed that sense of transgression and Blanchett’s talent to create a wonderfully steely and compelling story, refusing to strip the characters of either their agency or their very human uncertainty in love.

@KenzaBryan