The opening scene, set at Christmas in the toy section of a department store, is almost spooky in its pre-technological stillness: the dolls in glass cases might be playthings from a distant century, and the dim lighting blankets everything in shadow. It’s the perfect place for Therese (Rooney Mara), a doleful shop girl wearing a Santa Claus hat that’s the only jolly thing about her, to meet Carol (Cate Blanchett), a vamp in a mink coat who just about devours Therese with her appraising and adoring glances.

Carol is like a secret agent of love

     The movie is based on The Price of Salt, a 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel that was originally published under a pseudonym. The Highsmith world is a jungle that brims with predators, and when we first see Carol, with her hot-pink hat and scarf and slightly bored but grand manner, it’s easy to assume that she’s some sort of restless femme fatale. Blanchett gives her a smile that’s obscenely ripe, as well as a voice of aristocratic hauteur that puts the sin in insinuating. It’s all very Barbara Stanwyck-as-black-widow.

Yet there’s a good reason for Carol’s highly suggestive manner. She’s wealthy and privileged but trapped in a society that has no place for her desires, so she has little choice but to suggest them. She’s like a secret agent of love. Her seduction of Therese, which begins over a lunch of creamed spinach and martinis, almost has to be cloaked and conniving, because she’s opening up the younger woman to feelings that no one at the time even has words for.

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