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 The film, which has won rave reviews from critics and
audiences, shows Blanchett's title character and Rooney Mara as
the shopgirl Therese Belivet having an affair that includes
making love in a motel "presidential suite".
Blanchett at a news conference was quick to contradict the
published version of an interview she gave to the trade
publication Variety in which she seemed to say she brought
personal experience of affairs with women to the role.
"From memory, the conversation ran, 'Have you had relationships
with women?' And I said, 'Yes, many times. If you mean I've had
sexual relationships with them, the answer is 'No' -- but that
obviously didn't make it to print," the Australian actress and
mother of four children said.
"But in 2015, the point should be: Who cares?," she added.
"Carol" follows hard on the heels of the graphic "La Vie d'Adele"
(Blue is the Warmest Color) about a lesbian affair, which won
Cannes's top Palme d'Or prize two years ago.
Haynes's gorgeously photographed and sensitively plotted film is
distinctly less racy but hugely sympathetic to the relationship
of two women who fall in love when they set eyes on each other
in a store at Christmas time.
Towards the end, when Carol is facing a choice between losing
her lover and losing custody of her daughter, because of her
supposedly bad moral character, she tells her husband and a
roomful of lawyers she will not go against her nature.
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The film is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, who also wrote
"The Talented Mr Ripley", but which she penned under a pseudonym
because of the taboo subject matter.
"It was the first sort of lesbian story that had a happy ending,"
said Blanchett, who added that she had read several lesbian-themed
novels to research her character.
The film uses Cincinnati as a stand-in for 1950s New York City and
tries, as Haynes put it, to capture the "murky and maybe also
morally murky time and place" of early 1950s post-war America.
It is in part a tribute to the famous 1945 David Lean film "A Brief
Encounter" about a married woman having an affair with a stranger
she meets at a railway station, Haynes said, with both films opening
and closing with almost identical scenes.
"Carol" begins and ends with a scene of Carol and Therese having
coffee at a posh hotel. Both sequences are meant to be the same time
and place, but the viewer has now seen how the affair developed and
the scene takes on a different meaning.
(Editing by Hugh Lawson)
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