Todd Haynes’ Use of the Point-of-View in “Carol”
CAROL, directed by Todd Haynes, follows Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), 1950’s New York shopgirl, and her whirlwind romance with fabulous housewife Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett). Beloved by critics and me alike, the film is nominated for six Academy Awards.
In the best scene of CAROL, Carol picks up Therese for an afternoon visit to Carol’s New Jersey estate. It’s an extremely simple scene from a plotting standpoint: the two characters drive to New Jersey, stopping at a Christmas tree stand. Thus far they have met twice: a brief encounter inside a department store and on an extremely contrived thank-you-for-returning-my-gloves lunch (as one does). Both characters are obviously intrigued by the other, but they’ve yet to truly connect. So in the trip scene, Haynes has his job set out in front of him: the scene exists only to further our understanding of Carol and Therese’s developing relationship.
The scene starts fairly insignificantly. Carol is introduced to Therese’s boyfriend Richard as Therese enters the car. But as soon as they drive away, Therese and Carol’s small talk is filtered to the background as Carter Burwell’s score swells. Their dialogue is so insignificant, so beside the point, that you literally cannot make out most of what they are saying. Instead, the camera focuses on physical details and body language: Carol’s magnificent fur coat, her hair, lips, and hands. The camera’s soft focus feels almost like a dream state, and for Therese, it is. The shots of Carol’s hair, coat and lips are unmistakably from Therese’s perspective, emotionally investing us in the scene. We instinctively understand that she’s intoxicated by Carol’s presence: the lingering camera almost makes us feel like we’re staring. A minute later, again from Therese’s point of view, she watches across a crowd as Carol picks out a tree, a mirror of the scene in which when they first met. In both scenes, through a sea people, Therese has only eyes for Carol. It’s great, condensed filmmaking, and on paper, it’s pretty simple: Carol picks up Therese, they drive for a little bit, Carol picks out a tree. But what could have been the most straightforward of scenes becomes the foundation of the rest of the film: we fall in love with Carol and Therese as Therese and Carol fall for each other.
In bringing this emotion, Haynes uses a visual motif seen throughout the film: the pseudo-point-of-view shot, wherein we understand what (or perhaps more importantly, how) the character is seeing without actually being inside their head. The semi-point-of-view shot is usually composed one of two ways: either in a large, crowded space with the subject roughly in the middle of the frame, or claustrophobically indoors, where doors and walls take up much of the frame, often through one or two rooms. Towards the beginning of the film, these shots are almost all from Therese’s perspective: looking in on her boyfriend Richard sleeping or watching Carol and her daughter decorate the Christmas tree. But they all have one thing in common: people. They exclusively come when Therese or Carol are considering a relationship or learning something new about a person. They’re distinctive and infrequent enough that when Haynes uses this shot, its effect is similar to a traditional close-up (basically the equivalent of Haynes grabbing and shaking you, yelling “THIS IS IMPORTANT!”). Though point of view shot has come up before, its use is magnified in the trip scene.
Beyond the emotional impact, what’s so notable about the trip scene is how Haynes sets up visual language to which he’ll constantly return. By this point he’s trained us in what the point of view shot means: it’s intimate, meant to be either be shared between two characters or suggest how a character is considering their relationship with the shot’s subject (most of this is pretty obvious. Saying that point of view shots are imbued with a sense of intimacy is not exactly the most insightful thought I’ve ever had). Eventually, as Therese and Carol’s relationship strengthens, we start to see some shots from Carol’s view as well. But what’s really remarkable is how Haynes takes this shot, and after he’s trained us to understand this semi-point-of-view perspective in scenes like the trip to New Jersey, comes back to it, this time without any characters attached.
The best single shot of the film comes in a scene in which Carol visits Therese in her tiny apartment for the first time. The camera starts on Therese, then pivots and stays static as she crosses the room, walks down the hall, and greets Carol at the door. It’s only the second time the characters are allowed to be totally alone, and we get to watch this strikingly intimate moment as an invisible onlooker. The reason this feels like a point-of-view shot is its compositional similarity earlier shots in the film. Haynes has established that this type of composition is used only in conjunction with the point of view shot, so when he breaks his own rule, two effects happen: for one, the scene is given a sense of importance, and two, we automatically view this scene as we would through a character’s eyes. But this time, that character doesn’t exist. Haynes is literally tricking us into being part of the scene by reappropriating visual language he’s already established. It’s a good trick!!
This moment is featured on a poster for the film for a reason: it somehow manages to capture the mood, the essence of both characters, and feel of the entire film all at once. It lets the audience view Therese and Carol with their guard down, behind closed doors, using visual means to mirror themes of oppression and restraint seen throughout the film.
Haynes’s inspired marriage of formal and dramatic themes make up the most indelible images of CAROL. The heightened emotion these scenes create alongside Phyllis Nagy’s beautiful screenplay and excellent performances from Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett [1] form a masterpiece. It’s really a bummer that a film so carefully crafted will be shut out at the Oscars, but that will more than likely be the case. The frigging Revenant will probably win best picture. Well! Anyways!
[1]It seems strange to write about CAROL without mentioning the incredible performances from both Mara and Blanchett. So I’ll do that now! Mara in particular puts in complex, subtle work as a woman hiding churning emotions under a glassy veneer (this, too, is mirrored by stylistic choices from Haynes:
often he’ll use a shot of Therese looking out a (usually rain-streaked) window to establish a scene). Blanchett’s Carol is the showier role, but it’s not without its complexities either, as her woman-about-town type is constantly performing herself. It’s in the cracks of this performance, when Carol’s vulnerabilities are exposed, that Blanchett excels.
