I’ll begin with a warning. I will not be writing in framings, long shots, make-up and whatever else. I will most definitely fall in some technical critique but I’m not myself a critic, nor a self-styled. I’ll write about what I felt in seeing these two films, the notes I took, the criticisms that I wrote down. All very questionable and debatable.
There you go: I’ll write all these questionable and debatable things about Carol and Joy.
I watched Carol. And I watched Joy. Two very different films, to be honest. So why am I talking about them together? Without wasting time, I’ll talk about them together because not only they both talk about women, but because they talk about women in a very specific, particular way.
I watched Carol twice. The first time because I couldn’t wait to watch it, the second time to try to understand if it was true that I hadn’t liked it.
Very briefly, to avoid spoilers for those who still haven’t seen it, the film narrates the love story between Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), who is struggling with the end of a marriage out of which she had a daughter whom she loves so deeply, and Therese Belivet, a nineteen-year-old aspiring photographer.
The setting is New York in 1952. We are in the McCarthyism period, that period of American history between the end of the forties and the first half of the fifties, where he opened a veritable witch hunt against alleged communist, socialist, pro-Soviet and, why not, homosexuals.
I don’t know if it is in the book on which it’s based, but in the film McCarthyism is barely mentioned. Just a bit – really, I’m not being ironic: it only talks about some of the general communist accusations and of the morality clause (the clause that Carol’s husband puts against her, because of her lesbian story, to take away her daughter from her). But the historical context is not significant: we know that some of the characters are conservatives, but we can’t really feel the real hatred that was felt at the time. I imagined this period, quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, as “a veritable wave of fascism!” And instead…
Oh well, maybe it’s just me being pedantic, but one can understand that the film is se tin the fifties from what the characters are wearing.
The movie is extremely slow. There are a few plot twists, there is the actress’ talent, but I can’t explain to myself why this film has all these Oscar nominations.
The character of Therese, then, is completely flat. Sometimes she talks, but you don’t really understand how these two women could fall in love. They barely know each other! Therese doesn’t really talk about herself, she doesn’t open up to Carol. It seems like they haven’t actually shared anything, that they were just meant to fall in love and nothing else. It doesn’t explain why they turn out to be the Thelma and Louise of the situation (two women, a trip and a gun), so out of the blue. If someone, with whom I have the same relationship as that between Carol and Therese in the first part of their story, asked me to leave everything and go around the valleys of the West, the first thing I would say would be: “But who are you anyways?”.
Carol is badly in need of affection. And she requests for it.
Maybe this is what holds their story together, you ask. They are two desperate women in search of the first opportunity, you tell yourself.
But it can’t be.
After watching it for the first time, you remain with the doubt. After watching it for the second time, you give yourself some answers and you learn to distinguish between the film and the story. Regarding the film, there are still a lot of perplexities – starting from the imaginative world in which, without insults, lesbianism is “accepted” – regarding the story – without stereotypes and far from the contemporary romantic tragedies – none.
Meanwhile, I got informed, and the book describes a Therese who has an unhappy past, which leads her to think a lot and that makes her lose confidence in human relationships. But that maybe she has something to say with her eyes and with her looks.
There you go, it’s a film about looks. From the scene of the mirror, when Carol caresses Therese’s hair, that reminds me of the Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, to the last scene: the two of them are looking at each other from afar, Therese gets closer. They look at each other. “I’m here”, “You’re here”, they tell each other with their eyes.
You just understand that they are saying that.
It’s a love based on looks. It’s a pure love that exudes the desire to complete and transcends any ethical norm. It’s an abnormal love – at the time – that becomes normalized with the two women’s attitude.
It’s an old love. A private love.
It’s a kind of love that you don’t understand until you don’t understand what kind of love it is: you need to understand their looks, because it’s something of their own, between Carol and Therese, and if you don’t want to remain an outsider you need to interfere.
You need to look at them, like they look at each other.
You need to listen to them, like they listen to each other.
You need to wish to desire them, like they desire each other.
Then, slowly, you understand that it’s a normal love and that other people’s things don’t normal stand out to you at first sight. Until you make their things your own, because you are normal as well, and you live and do things normally.
Carol is a woman who is forced to choose between the love for her daughter and the love for her lover, but who in the end chooses the love for one and another while making compromises.
Compromises that Joy doesn’t accept to make, interpreted in the other film by Jennifer Lawrence.
Or rather: compromises that Joy is not forced to make, the inventor of the self-wringing mop. We are talking about two different stories, of course, but in which the image given to the woman is one of great innovation.
It’s the autonomous and self-made woman, who you almost forget has been – and still is – victim of the sexist cultural clause. One which, starting from the bottom, becomes a star. Because Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop, the magic broom to clean the floors, really exists.
Her grandmother Mimi used to tell Joy that she would have become a great “matriarch”, that her ideas would have changed the world.
Her dad, on the other hand, used to tell her that she was wrong to believe in these things. That she needed to stay at home, with her daughter, to work extremely hard to deal with everyone around her: the sociopathic mother, her young daughter, the elderly grandmother – who is also the narrator – her ex-husband, and sometimes the father himself.
But no. Of course not! She goes out and does exactly what she wants to do, without hesitation –and of course she gets what she wants.
It’s a story of struggle and power to herself. Joy, it’s a classic American story – telesales, people who call in to buy products, bankruptcy, salespeople – that brings a smile to people’s faces.
But which, to be frank, has some important points to reflect upon.
The first, and the most evident one – but I do not know, I do not think, this is the intent of the film – it is that this magical mop, in the sense of a simple commercial product to sell, is aimed at women. It’s not the fault of the film or of Joy: it’s just my own reflection. It’s the women who are in charge of cleaning the mess that everyone else leaves behind at home: “Ladies, mothers, grandmothers, come and try the self-wringing mop. Anyways, we already know, that it’s your turn to clean”.
Therefore I wonder whether Joy manages to convince the audience because it’s a woman who invented the mop, and so she knows how to use it and sell it, or because she is a skilled entrepreneur. We also have to ask ourselves whether Joy got a second go at her life or if she’s been gobbled up by this business system, made up of greedy wolves, who uses her as a means to sell.
The second point is that Joy is the exception to that rule that wants men as entrepreneurs and women as integrity matriarchs. The data on women’s entrepreneurship or the presence of gender quotas on company boards are clear.
Perhaps, more simply, it is a story of hope, or illusion, call it what you will, that says: your ideas, if valid, will make you winning people.
Is it true?
