Cate Blanchett: 'Carol' is an epic love story
LOS ANGELES — Carol digs deep into universal longing. Just sub out boy-meets-girl with girl-meets-girl and turn the clock back to an era when same-sex love could land you in jail.
Two men in love, actually.
"In the '50s, homosexual relationships were illegal, because they were seen as something that actually could exist. But there wasn't even an acceptance or an awareness of relationships between women — it was in the realm of the hysteric," says Cate Blanchett, who plays the title role of a married, tony New Jersey housewife who falls for a young New York shopgirl in Carol (opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands to additional cities through Christmas).
Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara resist labels with 'Carol'
That kind of love "was just a female dysfunction," she says. "The fact that they're women, they have an added layer of prejudice to push through and be heard. It doesn't even warrant being a crime, what they feel for each other."
But Carol, adapted from the 1952 novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (via the pseudonym Claire Morgan; Highsmith also wrote Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley under her own name, the latter of which Blanchett also happens to star in), isn't a hysterical love story.
Under director Todd Haynes' direction, it's a slow seduction, an elegant, Mad Men-like ride steeped in the forbidden. When Carol, ordering an expensive Christmas gift for her young daughter, leaves her leather gloves behind in the store, Therese "makes the first move," says Mara, and ships them to her address.
The act spurs Carol to invite her to lunch, where "everything is so loaded and coded," says Blanchett. "They're not sure whether they're receiving what they think they're hearing … and that's the same of anyone, irrespective of your gender. When you actually form an attraction to someone, you always second guess yourself. You think 'I'm not really feeling this … Is he/she feeling what I'm feeling? Are you saying what I think you're saying?' "
Mara nods. "People still do that, but the new version is, like, over text. You can dissect every word in a text message," she says.
A quiet chess match of attraction blooms over a meal, a frosty road trip and a small exchange of Christmas gifts amid Carol's messy divorce. Carol, who is trying to extract herself from her marriage to a confused husband (Kyle Chandler), has been in a failed lesbian love affair before. Therese has a boyfriend, and, by her own admission, has a tendency to say yes to everything.
Mara calls her character naïve. "She's at this place in her life where she's deciding what kind of woman she wants to be, and she has this seemingly great boyfriend and a group of friends and a job. But she's very lonely in her life," she says.
"And then Carol steps in, and she sort of has never seen anyone like that before, and didn't even know it was possible to be a woman like that."
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Carol made a splash at its Cannes Film Festival debut, with Mara taking home the best actress prize. Critics are still raving, with Entertainment Weekly calling the film "a gorgeous time capsule" and Variety writing that "even high expectations don't quite prepare you for the startling impact of Carol, an exquisitely drawn, deeply felt love story."
To Blanchett, the film represents a genderless love story, "in a similar way to Brokeback Mountain. It's sort of an epic love ... a monumental, unstoppable love. And there are enough roadblocks and impediments that any sensible, normal person with a modicum of timidity would run in another direction, but it's bigger than either of them."