Dialogic Cinephilia: Carol (UK/USA: Todd Haynes, 2015)

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Carol (UK/USA: Todd Haynes, 2015)

Carol (UK/USA: Todd Haynes, 2015: 118 mins)

"The 30 Best LGBT Films of All Time." BFI (March 15, 2016)

Blanchett, Kate. "Carol." DP/30 (November 16, 2015)

Bordwell, David. "Pick Your Protagonists." Observations on Film Art (January 9, 2016)

Bra, Roberto. "Glances in Carol." (Posted on Vimeo: March 2016)

Brody, Richard. "Carol Up Close." The New Yorker (November 30, 2015)

Carol Critics Round Up (Ongoing Archive)

Carvajal, Nelson. "Todd Haynes' Isolated Women." Press Play (November 3, 2015)

Davis, Nick. "The Object of Desire: Todd Haynes discusses Carol and the satisfactions of telling women’s stories." Film Comment (November/December 2015)

Digging Deeper. "Carol: The Love Story in a Look." (Posted on Youtube: April 7, 2016)

Dolan, Jill. "Carol." The Feminist Spectator (December 25, 2015)

Enelow, Shonni. "The Great Recession: Restrained but resilient, a style of acting has taken hold that speaks to an era’s anxieties." Film Quarterly (September-October 2016) ["This is another way to read the emotional withdrawal or refusal in these performances: as a response to a violent or chaotic environment, one that doesn’t offer an alternate vision of an open and embracing future. For even when representing an alienating or unfeeling world, actors of earlier eras generally appealed to the camera and their audiences to receive their feelings and implicitly trusted them to respond generously, either through vicarious sentiment or humanist compassion. Expressive acting—of which Method acting is one dominant form—is built on the conviction that audiences want an actor’s emotions to be in some way available to them. There’s a basic optimism in that conviction: the optimism that the world would be better if we all told each other the truth about what we feel. In contrast, many of today’s most lauded American film actors give performances that evince no such optimism about emotional expression. Returning to Winter’s Bone, for example, it’s clear that within the fiction of the film, Ree doesn’t trust the world to care about her well-being. But rather than contrast her character’s suspicion with an appeal to the (presumably) sympathetic film audience, Lawrence maintains her wariness throughout. Likewise, Mara doesn’t cut Lisbeth’s lowered gaze and near-inaudible, clipped speech with any revelation or outburst that would make us think she could be—or really is, deep down—other than she appears. There aren’t hidden motivations in these performances, and in fact, close to no subtext (the idea of subtext, with its inherently psychological schema, is parodied in Carol by a would-be writer who takes notes on the difference between what characters in movies say and what they really feel)."]

Graham, Bill, Jordan Raup and Brian Roan. "Carol." The Film Stage (January 8, 2016)

Gray, Duncan. "Private Lives: Carol and the Cinema of Todd Haynes." The Notebook (January 28, 2016)

Lane, Anthony. "Secret Lives: Carol and Legend." The New Yorker (November 23, 2015)

Lee, Kevin B. "Video Evidence: Oscar 2016, Best Actress." Keyframe (January 20, 2016)

---. "Video Evidence: Oscar 2016, Best Cinematography." Keyframe (February 3, 2016)

---. "Video Evidence: Oscar 2016, Best Supporting Actress." Keyframe (January 28, 2016)

López, Cristina Álvarez. "Carol: Ravishment." Keyframe (February 9, 2016)

Maxwell, Lida. "Does Love Have a Politics?" Los Angeles Review of Books (February 24, 2016)

Nagy, Phyllis. "Carol: Screenplay." (September 2015)

---. "Carol Screenwriter talks Cate Blanchett, Todd Haynes, and Isabelle Huppert’s Pact with The Devil." Flixwise (February 14, 2017) ["The funny and brilliant Phyllis Nagy is here to talk about adapting Carol’s screenplay from Patricia Highsmith’s original source material and the lengthy, and at times frustrating, process of getting the film into production. They chat about Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara’s rendering of the two lead characters, as well as the standout performance from supporting players, Sarah Paulson and Kyle Chandler. Plus, Phyllis offers a scoop on what happened to a few scenes from the book that didn’t make the final cut of the film. ... In addition to filling us in on details from behind-the-scenes of Carol, Phyllis is also here to discuss a pair of standout performances by the incomparable French actress, Isabelle Huppert. This year Huppert was, at long last, nominated for her first Academy Award. However, Huppert has been giving Oscar-worthy performances well before she ever worked with Verhoeven. If you are unfamiliar with her work up to this point, you might not know where to begin, as her filmography is quite extensive. Fortunately, Phyllis is here to offer up two of her favorite Huppert films as suggestions for your watch list: Claude Chabrol’s 1988 film: Story of Women, and Diane Kurys 1983 film: Entre Nous. Both Story of Women and Entre Nous are period dramas which find Huppert playing malcontented married women, both of whom form deep attachments to their closest female friends. In Story of Women she plays Marie Latour, a woman who, despite her husband’s objections, traffics in abortions and other illegal various dealings in German occupied France. In Entre Nous, Huppert plays Lena Weber, a woman who falls into an expedient marriage in order to escape Nazi control, but after the war is over falls in the love with another woman."]

O'Malley, Sheila. "Carol." Roger Ebert (November 20, 2015)

Phillips, Eva. "Carol and the Ineffable Queerness of Being." Another Gaze (February 21, 2016)

Prose, Francine. "Love is the Plot." NYR Daily (December 11, 2015)

Ramon, Alex. "Todd Haynes' Carol Could Have Been Better." Pop Matters (May 17, 2016)

Rich, Frank. "Loving Carol." Vulture (November 18, 2015)

Sims, David. "Why Carol Is Misunderstood." Atlantic (January 15, 2016)

Smith, Victoria L. "The Heterotopias of Todd Haynes: Creating Space for Same Sex Desire in Carol." Film Criticism 42.1 (March 2018) ["Using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (an “other space”), this essay contends space is key to understanding Haynes’s Carol. It examines how Haynes, through his meticulous attention to framings, textures, color, and spatial relations, creates a queer counter space, time, and look—a rejection of early 1950s social and sexual propriety."]