3D

3D

Sunday 20 December 2015

Looking to Find the Truth


Beautiful to look at and intensely moving, more than anything, the film Carol by Todd Haynes is a film about looking, spying and voyeurism in general. It is this aspect that makes the film a perfect ode to cinema and its photographic origin.

It starts from the film's material feel; the film has a grain to it that makes it seem, along with its gorgeous costume and set design, like celluloid coming straight from the 1950s. This is due to it having been filmed on super 16 mm film, which can be enlarged digitally to 35 mm (the standard cinematic film size), in this way giving the film immensely textured visuals adding to the authentic 50s feeling. There are various moments in the film that make a clear reference to film, such as a scene early on, shot from the projection booth of a cinema, where we get a brief glimpse of Sunset Blv., one of the most knowingly self-referential films from that era.

Furthermore, the obsession with its medium comes back in the main character Therese's interest in photography. There are various scenes that involve looking through a lens, focusing on the apparatus of the photo-camera as well as the gradual development of the photograph in its solution. Especially in this last scene we can find endless cinematic references to the mid-century era of film, from Peeping Tom to Blow Up. It is also no coincidence that her photography reminded me very much of Vivian Mayer, on whom her work is apparently modelled. A shy photographer, Mayer's work was only discovered after she died, yet the photos showed a keen eye for humanity, to which one conversation in the film clearly points.

However, besides the technical aspects and references in the film, the looks performed by the two main characters, played brilliantly by Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett, are amongst the most intense you'll ever encounter on the silver screen. It is the act of looking and being looked at that comes back in the very narrative of the film, with an important tipping point in the story relating to being spied upon. There is one particular scene at the very start of the film that is repeated at the end with added context, which has incredibly powerful tension, enhanced by the sound briefly falling away. Something very rare happens at this moment:  for just a few seconds the film becomes pure cinema. The characters are just looking at each other, we only see them and feel a whole raging storm of emotions hiding behind their perfectly composed exterior. The film becomes a pure powerful image without sound or melodrama, to which the immensely involved spectator adds everything. Through this activity we become spectators with agency and it is a wonderful feeling indeed.

There are various moments like these in the film that focus on looking alone: by showing a close up of a gloved hand on the radio, the texture of a fur coat, lipsticked lips, or when viewing someone going home in the distance while the frame is partially covered by the dark curved hood of a car. It shows a world so constricted and superficially beautiful, a place of endless artificiality and pretence, where a look is the only thing that remains when one is desperate to find a shimmer of truth.

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