Why Carol remains a huge milestone for queer, female-fronted cinema (2024)

As part of Digital Spy's 25th anniversary and to celebrate Pride Month, we're looking back over some of the most significant LGBTQ+ movies of the past 25 years.

Next up, Stefania Sarrubba looks back on Carol and its importance for queer, female-fronted cinema.

"There are no accidents, and everything comes full circle," Cate Blanchett's character writes to her lover in a heart-shattering moment of Todd Haynes' Carol.

It also applies to how the filmmaker merges the beginning and end of this queer romance – an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt – by way of a flashback in exquisite frames.

Nearly a decade since its 2015 release, the film, starring Blanchett and Rooney Mara as Carol Aird and Therese Belivet, two women inevitably falling for each other after a chance encounter in 1950s New York, holds up magnificently.

A movie that manages to be poignant and moving whilst escaping the 'Sad Lesbian Curse', Carol honours Highsmith's partly autobiographical novel thanks to a lucid script from playwright Phyllis Nagy. A friend of the author, Nagy builds upon Highsmith's real-life lore to provide an uncompromising look into queer lives.

Carol is many things. For one, it's an accidental Christmas classic.

The protagonists first lock eyes at the department store where aspiring photographer Therese, a stand-in for Highsmith, works during the holidays. Glamorous, aloof housewife Carol is looking to buy her daughter Rindy a gift and makes a lasting impression on Therese. Then and there, the transfixed shopgirl blocks out the screaming children and their mothers to cautiously scan this vision of light.

It's the film that cemented Blanchett as a queer icon, too.

"I like the hat," Carol cheekily tells Therese, who reluctantly wears a Santa bonnet as part of her outfit. Those four words make it impossible to suppress the giddiness of having someone radiating such beauty acknowledging your presence.

One of the most acclaimed and beloved queer, female-focused tales, Carol was voted the best LGBTQ+ movie of all time by the BFI in 2016.

While this title felt a tad premature (and it also pointed at a wider problem with the film's lack of diversity), doubting its genuine impact begs the question as to whether we've come to expect even the most subjective works to speak for wider communities, and if that's even ever possible.

Carol is inherently limited as an insight into the experiences of two white, somewhat privileged women who get to have their tumultuous happy ending, though is decidedly nestled at the intersection of gender, class and identity, all themes touched upon in its 119-minute runtime.

Haynes' film shines compared to most other queer stories — particularly those about lesbian and bisexual women ending up lonely, or dead — because of how organically its central romance blossoms, and how that love becomes a radical act in itself.

Loyal to Highsmith's rebellious, life-affirming book, Nagy's script doesn't revolve around a coming out or an internal struggle. The movie leaves shame and judgement at the door, throwing a sumptuous party of self-assertion, and unfolds as a coming of age for both Therese and, most subtly, Carol.

This is not to say their romance isn't weighed down by the social constraints of the time, as it is menaced by an insidious form of gender-based coercive control that still won't die down today.

Carol, much like The Price of Salt and most of Highsmith's work, is profoundly violent, and all threats looming large on Carol and Therese come from men frustrated at losing their supposed authority over them.

The movie speaks to most women regardless of their sexual orientation when it depicts the micro- and macro-aggressions the protagonists face, punished for daring to deviate from being obedient wives and doting mothers before anything else.

From Carol's estranged husband Harge, who uses their daughter Rindy as a bargaining chip, to Therese's boyfriend Richard, who demands her to fit into his traditional dream of marriage and kids, to Dannie, Therese's pal at the New York Times who offers to help her find a photography job and hits on her — all of Carol's men want to profit off their interactions with women.

In the second act, the quasi-couple cut their road trip across a snowy Midwest short so that Carol can attend her nasty divorce proceedings. In a room full of men debating on her fitness as a mother after exposing her affair, she renounces shared custody of Rindy and settles for visitations if that means she gets to be her true self.

It's a turning point that offers a fresh, realistic portrayal of motherhood as an element coexisting with other aspects of being a woman, of being a person.

To an extent, the negotiation scene with the lawyers shocked over Carol's behaviour encapsulates some reactions to the film itself. A female-focused love story, and one featuring stunning intimate scenes at that, Carol put off some studios in the nearly twenty years that it took to get it made.

And it sure felt like the Academy missed the mark when it failed to nominate the movie for Best Picture and Best Director, despite its six other Oscar nods.

The mainstream may not have been ready for Haynes' film nine years ago, but a quiet, silently longing community of queer women was eagerly waiting for it, coalescing into the Cult of Carol.

These internet acolytes lived and breathed aesthetically pleasing Tumblrs curated with details of the gorgeous production design by Judy Becker, in-depth analyses of composer Carter Burwell's wondrous crescendo, and GIFs of Carol and Therese's sex scenes.

Most of these virtual altars are devoted to Blanchett's heroine, but it's Therese who guides the audience throughout. Hers is the metaphorical and literal lens through which Carol and their love step into focus.

Courtesy of Ed Lachman's evocative cinematography, Haynes' feature thrives in nostalgic, hazy transitions and steamed-up glass panes, but ultimately aims at removing all filters between the two women. In a movie that's as much about being seen as it is about seeing, holding the gaze is everything.

And the gaze of Carol is all Therese's.

In truth, it would be hard for any young queer person who's ever been in love not to be drawn to Mara's restrained performance, encompassing rage and adoringly orbiting around her object of affection whilst finding her trajectory.

If and how these two paths could ever truly align is the puzzle at the core of every relationship. That is the question that Haynes' movie answers by going back to the start in a closing sequence that brims with hope and trepidation.

You may not be at the lavish Oak Room in 1953 NYC but, as you sit in the back row of an unusually deserted multiplex, following Therese advancing towards Carol feels as if a glass has finally defogged.

Watching this was no accident, and you realise you'll walk out with clearer eyes.

Carol is available to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Microsoft Store and other digital retailers.