‘Carol’ review: Cate Blanchett shines in ’50s lesbian drama

Cate Blanchett floats through Todd Haynes’ “Carol” as Mrs. Carol Aird, a picture of sophistication, wit and wealth. Draped in fur and immaculately painted from her lips to her fingernails, she’s the kind of martini-society doyenne that epitomized postwar New York City. Carol is also, to use a word that the film never does, a lesbian.

“Carol” is based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt,” published under a pseudonym in 1952. Despite the closeting of its author, and despite its closeted characters, the book is remembered for one simple act of bravery: Unlike much same-sex fiction then and now, it doesn’t end in complete tragedy. Haynes’ adaptation, a sumptuous and voluptuous cinematic experience, is faithful to its author’s intention. (The screenplay is by Phyllis Nagy.)

Rooney Mara plays Therese Belivet, a lonely salesgirl at a snooty Manhattan department store. That’s where she locks eyes with Carol, who boldly chats her up and conveniently leaves behind a pair of handsome leather gloves. Thus begins a friendship, then a courtship and then — when Carol’s husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), finds out — a romance on the lam.

“Carol” is Haynes’ companion piece to “Far From Heaven,” also set in the ’50s and starring Julianne Moore as the wife of a gay man. Both films pay tribute to Douglas Sirk, a director of that era whose deceptively glossy melodramas tackled thorny issues of race, class and sexuality. “Carol,” shot in dreamy Super 16mm by cinematographer Ed Lachman and accompanied by Carter Burwell’s lush score, feels both sensual and unreachable — a possible metaphor for the love between its heroines, who are often framed behind car windows, glass doors and other not-quite-permeable barriers.

“Carol” sometimes feels overly steamy, as if physical desire were the main bond between this confident older woman and her less certain lover (a dynamic that has appeared in other gay movies like “High Art” and “Brokeback Mountain”). The film’s most emotionally resonant moment isn’t a love scene, but a furious, desperate speech Carol makes when her young daughter is nearly taken from her on grounds of “immoral” behavior.

Though Mara is very fine as the malleable Therese, it’s Blanchett who owns this movie, delivering her second Oscar-worthy performance of the year after “Truth.”