Carol (2015)

Todd Haynes has made a film of almost aggressive restraint, in which two women fall in love in 1952 New York and the camera refuses to editorialize. The romance between Carol Aird and Therese Belivet sits at the center of every frame, handled with a delicacy that most contemporary dramas would find unbearable. There is no breakdown scene, no confession of shame, no speech explaining the historical stakes to a modern audience. The lovers simply love, and the world around them quietly conspires to make that love expensive. As an artifact of queer cinema it operates at the highest level, and the British Film Institute's decision to rank it the greatest LGBTQ film ever made is not difficult to understand.

The film also concerns itself with a woman's desire and her refusal to disown it. When Carol faces a morality clause and the threat of losing her daughter, she declines to lie about who she is, accepting the cost with a composure that borders on the stoic. This is a feminist argument delivered without a manifesto. Therese, meanwhile, builds a life and a career as a photographer, moving from objects to people, from a department store counter to the New York Times. These women want things, and the film lets them pay for wanting them.

Where the film declines to participate is in the broader catalog of contemporary concerns. The cast is uniformly white, and the narrative shows no interest in race, climate, or the failings of capitalism, despite the department store that opens the story. The screenplay was reportedly built to avoid the agenda picture, and it succeeds. Social weight arrives through implication, not instruction. What remains is a love story that trusts its audience to feel the injustice without being told where to look. The restraint is the point, and it is nearly extinct.