That this exchange takes place within the feminine domain of the department store – the doll counter, no less – clearly places the film within the world of women. While men hover at the periphery, their attempts to insert themselves into Carol and Therese’s intimate shared world are rightfully experienced by both women as unwelcome intrusions. In contrast, both Therese’s boyfriend, Richard (Jake Lacy) and Carol’s husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler) are baffled by the women’s quick affinity for and deepening attachment to one another. Their confusion is partially the result of masculine ego – how could a woman be their romantic rival? But it’s also an insecure response to the loss of their own holiday fantasy and the pride of place they enjoyed within it. Richard is meant to be his family’s golden boy, with a pretty fiancée on his arm and a bright future ahead of him. Harge is meant to be the successful patriarch, with a beautiful daughter bouncing on one knee and his elegant wife at his side. This is, after all, what Hollywood has taught them they should be entitled to.
For all their differences, Carol and Therese share a sense of alienation from not just their heterosexual relationships (and, perhaps, heterosexuality itself) but also the holiday pageantry that often imbues those relationships with unearned romance. Instead, we see them genuinely capture the spirit of the season – and the promise of love it seems to offer – in the moments they share exclusively with one another. These are not big Hollywood moments full of saccharine spectacle, like those in Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas (1954). They’re small gestures: photographing the person you’re in love with as they laugh in the Christmas tree lot, watching them tentatively play a holiday tune on a piano, nervously giving them a gift you’re unsure that they’ll like. These common experiences, shared by two women at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offense, resonate differently for anyone who has experienced a love that’s unable to be expressed publicly during a season that encourages the public expression of love.
This is, in part, why the two women abandon Manhattan and all its twinkling lights for a road trip through decidedly less romantic midwestern states. The trip is an escape from the seasonal stress they feel at home, but it also provides the privacy and anonymity required for them to have the holiday affair so easily afforded to heterosexual couples in films like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and William Dieterle/George Cukor’s I’ll Be Seeing You (1944). Unable to stroll arm-in-arm through Central Park or kiss in front of the tree at Rockefeller Center, Carol and Therese instead turn a series of impersonal hotel rooms into self-contained spaces of feminine domesticity and companionship. By New Year’s Eve, their tentative romance has developed into something much deeper, and we are given a holiday fantasy unprecedented in any of the films Carol evokes: two women confessing and consummating their love for one another.
Critical commentary that followed Carol’s celebrated première at Cannes in 2015 focused on its revision of the classical Hollywood “woman’s film,” bringing the genre’s lesbian subtext to the surface and foregoing the spiritual punishment that films like King Video’s Stella Dallas (1937) or David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) doled out to women who dared to follow their own desires.
But Carol is also a self-conscious revision of the Christmas film, appropriating its tropes and reimagining them from a specifically lesbian point of view that fundamentally sees the holidays differently. It is also, simply, a deeply moving love story, one that transcends any of the cinematic traditions to which it might belong. If we’re lucky, Carol will become as much a part of the holiday tradition as its predecessors, providing all of us with a model for investing in life over fantasy and always – whatever the season, obstacles, or cost – seeking love.