Cate Blanchett denied on Sunday a report she’d had affairs with women as the Cannes Film Festival swooned over her portrayal of a wealthy married woman who falls in love with an ambitious New York shopgirl in director Todd Haynes’s Carol.
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.
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.
“Call me old fashioned but I thought one’s job as an actor was not to present one’s boring, small, microscopic universe but to make a psychological connection to another character’s experiences. My own life is of no interest to anyone else. Or maybe it is. But I certainly have no interest in putting my own thoughts and opinions out there.”
Haynes is not expecting any calls from conservatives in the United States for the movie’s steamy sex scenes to be removed.
“It has not been a concern,” he said. “We will forge ahead and see what happens.”
Blanchett admitted that she had been a little apprehensive about her love scene with Rooney. But she added: “It was a really important scene. [In the end] it was a scene like any other scene.”
However, Mara had no concerns about the scene. “I’m nude quite often so it was not a big deal for me.”
Carol follows hard on the heels of the graphic La Vie d’Adele (Blue is the Warmest Colour) 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.
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.
Her performance comes at a time when women are increasingly pushing back against the male-dominated film industry.
“Mid-range films with women at the centre are tricky to finance. There are a lot of people labouring under the misapprehension that people don’t want to see them, which isn’t true,” she told Variety magazine.
Blanchett also added her voice to the chorus criticising gender inequality at Cannes this year. The importance of female voices in film “fell off the agenda and we lost a lot of ground”, she said, before expressing her unhappiness at a recent headline declaring 2015 “the year of women”. “You hope it’s not just a year. Not just some fashionable moment.”
Blanchett made her breakthrough performance in 1998, playing the 16th century British monarch in Elizabeth, which won her a slew of awards and her first Oscar nomination.
Only a year earlier, she had been on the public side of the barrier on her first trip to Cannes, having to blag a ticket to get into one of the premieres.
By 1999, she was back in Cannes, but this time as a star, presenting An Ideal Husband.
“I was laughing so hard, because only two years earlier, I’d been on the other side of the barricades,” she told Variety.
_resources1_16a30b3d57a_small.jpg)
