Blanchett lesbian movie is Cannes contender
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A LEADING contender for the Palme d’Or, “Carol,” starring Cate Blanchett in a lesbian love story, had its world premiere at Cannes yesterday.
Reviews for the film, set in New York in the 1950s and directed by American film-maker Todd Haynes, have been so glowing that it’s already generating Oscar buzz — at the very least for Australian actress Blanchett, 46.
Blanchett, who has two acting Oscars, for “The Aviator” and “Blue Jasmine,” is “incandescent” as a socialite who begins a relationship with a shopgirl (Rooney Mara) despite the personal and societal hazards posed, according to Variety magazine.
It has “supreme intelligence, breathtaking poise and filmmaking craft of the most sophisticated yet accessible order,” Variety said.
Reviewers were nearly unanimous over Haynes’s “masterful” restraint, which drew the audience along until the end, when a stately yet powerful climax brought tears to the eyes of even hardened film critics.
Movie website Indiewire called it “a love story that starts at a trickle, swells gradually to a torrent, and finally bursts the banks of your heart.”
The movie is based on a book by Patricia Highsmith, who wrote crime thrillers including “The Talented Mr Ripley.” Here, there is no “crime” committed — although the women’s relationship is viewed as such in the reproving period in which it is set.
“The almost-pathological paranoia that is usually defined as criminal is, in this case, romantic,” Haynes, who is gay, explained to The Hollywood Reporter.
“Even before it became a story about lesbian love — which was, of course, criminal, as defined by the world at that time — it was just about love itself as something criminal.”
Haynes and Blanchett worked together on “I’m Not There,” in which Blanchett is among a cast of actors playing Bob Dylan.
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