REVIEW: Carol (2015)

Those expecting another Sirk tribute from Todd Haynes may be disappointed. Carol, like his version of Mildred Pierce before it, is a different film entirely and has more than likely been mis-sold to the public. Carol is less a film of political outrage and more a stylish and slow paced film of mood and thought.

Therese (Rooney Mara, now miles away from that disinterested turn – though who could blame her – in that awful Nightmare on Elm Street remake) is a shopgirl who does a kindness to one of her customers, mailing her back her misplaced gloves. This customer, however, is Carol, a seductive and glamourous divorcee. Carol invites her to lunch as a thank you and an attraction begins to develop between the two women before they even know it.

Early in the film, we have a character who is watching Sunset Boulevard for the sixth time and who is taking notes, his subject the disparity between what is said by the characters and what is meant or felt. A signal then to the audience that Carol will be a film of quiet, meaningful silences and yearning emotion masquerading as mundane small talk. The relationship between Therese and Carol develops slowly, the two women’s reserve as much a fact of the morals of the time as of their own fear, shyness and confusion. It is an unlikely relationship that may not initially make much sense, but it develops convincingly. Haynes keeps his camera distanced, the women frequently kept inside window frames and doorways. Kept back like this, we are always aware that the characters are a little more than we can understand – like in Sunset Boulevard, we see the front but not the mind. And, especially with the ending, we know that they will continue to exist after the film.

The characters are rarely allowed to lose their composure, but when they do, it matters. Carol’s husband, Harge, who forces Carol to stop her ‘deviance’ by taking her child away from her, loses his hard skin with an impassioned but hopeless “I love her.” The same line, slightly altered (“I love you”), similarly breaks from Carol towards the end of the film and has a truly powerful effect.

There are other times, however, where the film overplays its hand. Carol stands up to Harge and two male custody lawyers in one barnstorming scene that trespasses onto the wrong side of tacky. The Hollywood cinema of 1950s had a lot of such moments, but transplanted here it feels too jokey, too winking and knowing – as if the film has, for a moment, lost its serious veneer. The film lifts the opening and closing bookending from Brief Encounter, which works well enough while the film is playing but is quite irritating afterwards (particularly if you rewatch Brief Encounter in between – the moment in that film is perfect and heart-breaking and ought not to have been repeated). Quite why the film needed such an overt homage is anyone’s guess. Equally, the sequence in which Carol and Therese go away for a trip to Carol’s home in upstate New York literalises the idea of the ‘tunnel of love’ in a way that feels overdetermined.

Carol then is a film both quiet and intense. It is slow and mannered, as much as a means for intellectual distanciation as an expression of suppressed emotion. The final scene, while moving, is so clearly meant to make a critic write the word ‘swoon’ that it becomes as much a success of form as it does a success in character or story or emotion. Carol then is a very good, well made and moving film, but it also has a degree of practised coldness to it, a feeling of technique where honesty ought to be. It will work on the mind, and with the critics, but will it stay in the heart?

REVIEW: Blue Jasmine (2013)

Blue Jasmine is Woody Allen’s 45^th feature film and arguably his first to deal with the contemporary world in any real way. It is also his best-reviewed film in quite a while with most of the praise going to Cate Blanchett’s lead performance.

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is down on her luck. Once rich and married to successful businessman Hal (Alec Baldwin), she lived a full and vacuous life as one of the 1% in New York’s affluent Park Avenue. Following Hal’s arrest for all sorts of business fraud, Jasmine is left alone and broke. After a nervous breakdown, she moves to San Francisco to live with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who she has had little to do with since childhood. The film follows her as she tries to get used to working for a meagre living and as she tries get again to snare a rich husband. Meanwhile, she constantly berates her sister for her lack of ambition and choice in men – taking a particular dislike to Ginger’s fiancé Chili (Bobby Cannavale).

As is evident, Allen is in a sombre mood, making a serious film for the first time since the grim but interesting 2010 film You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The film begins with Jasmine at a very low point in her life and only briefly lightens up along the way, the drama heightened by frequent, well-integrated flashbacks of Jasmine’s time with Hal. These flashbacks are always introduced seamlessly into the narrative and frequently comment on the action, Allen’s movement between these modes displaying again his editorial skills as both a writer and director. The film unfolds well, saving certain backstory revelations until they can have their strongest, or cruellest, effect – particularly when it reveals what happened Hal after his arrest and why Ginger and her ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) detest him so much. As is often the case, Allen shows himself to be a fantastic storyteller, very much aware of when to come in and out of a scene and displaying a deft hand at exposition, nuance, character and music. The use of “Blue Moon” as a symbol of Jasmine’s traumatic disconnect from a highly romanticised past is perfect and, in the final scene, simply but powerfully moving. Jasmine is not a nice character but Blanchett’s incisive performance and Allen’s equally insightful script make her human and thoroughly understandable.

The film’s main problem lies in its contemporary relevance. Allen has thus far largely avoided making points on current affairs, making films that, at their best, feel effortlessly timeless. A film like Shadows and Fog is able to reach a large degree of theological and philosophical depth precisely because it has no contemporary relevance whatsoever and oftentimes Allen’s best films work in a similar vacuum. Similarly Blue Jasmine is thwarted slightly by a representation of the working class San Franciscans that is all beer, vests and sports on TV and not much of a stretch from Danny Aiello’s detestable, abusive Monk in The Purple Rose of Cairo. But while Monk was a character from the 1930s, Augie and Chili merely feel anachronistically like characters from the same decade. Allen has made a career of mocking the characteristics and peccadilloes of privileged pseudo-intellectual New Yorkers and it is admirable that he is trying to show the 99% for once. It is just a pity that he does not invest these characters with any depth. Augie and Chili too often feel like caricatures (something Allen often opts for too easily) and when they do not, it is easy to suspect that this is thanks more to Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Cannavale than to Woody Allen. Here, like Jasmine, Allen might have found himself in a world he does not understand.

Though itself tainted by Jasmine’s snobbery, Blue Jasmine is nonetheless a well-made drama with uniformly good performances and a further example of Allen’s talent for writing quick and believable scripts and directing complex and interesting dramas.


See also:
Midnight in Paris
To Rome With Love