Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt– 'CAROL'

Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt has become an entrancing Cannes premiere directed by Todd Haynes, beautifully made and outstandingly intelligent– It is a creamily sensuous, richly observed piece of work, handsomely detailed and furnished: the clothes, the hair, the automobiles, the train carriages, the record players, the lipstick and the cigarettes are all superbly presented. The combination of all this is intoxicating in itself.
CAROL– First Look Review by Peter Bradshaw

Todd Haynes’s Carol is an amour fou which plays out with sanity and generosity: it is a superbly realised companion piece to his 50s Sirkian drama Far From Heaven and an overt homage to Lean’s Brief Encounter.

The film is based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, about the love affair between a virginal shopgirl and the beautiful older married woman that she serves in the pre-Christmas rush in a Manhattan department-store: they are played here by Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. Just occasionally, along with the classic echoes, Carol has the obsessive frisson of Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing and – with the flourishing of a revolver – Haynes conjures a fraught kind of Nabokovian despair and futile melodrama.A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover.

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Author Patricia Highsmith is best known for her psychological thrillers Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Originally published in 1952 under a pseudonym, The Price of Salt was heralded as "the novel of a love society forbids." Highsmith's sensitive treatment of fully realized characters who defy stereotypes about homosexuality marks a departure from previous lesbian pulp fiction. Erotic, eloquent, and suspenseful, this story offers an honest look at the necessity of being true to one's nature.
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

Choose Your Highsmith

“Their eyes met at the same instant moment, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist, her eyes were grey, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and, caught by them, Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression, as if half her mind were on whatever is was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number of salesgirls between them, There felt sure the woman would come to her, Then, Then Therese saw her walk slowly towards the counter, heard her heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer.― She tried to keep her voice steady, but it was pretense, like pretending self-control when something you loved was dead in front of your eyes. They would have to separate here.”
― CAROL .

“If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.”―Patricia Highsmith

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, Directed by Thomas Vinterberg–

Based on the literary classic by Thomas Hardy, FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD is the story of independent, beautiful and headstrong Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), who attracts three very different suitors: Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a sheep farmer, captivated by her fetching willfulness; Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge), a handsome and reckless Sergeant; and William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), a prosperous and mature bachelor. This timeless story of Bathsheba’s choices and passions explores the nature of relationships and love – as well as the human ability to overcome hardships through resilience and perseverance. Meet visionary director Thomas Vinterberg in this featurette from the set of his new romantic period drama, FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD!

The first of Thomas Hardy’s great novels, Far From the Madding Crowd established the author as one of Britain’s foremost writers. It also introduced readers to Wessex, an imaginary county in southwestern England that served as the pastoral setting for many of the author’s later works. Hardy described his new novel to Leslie Stephen as “a pastoral tale,” and the very title of the novel announced its rural pedigree. The author derived his title from the nineteenth stanza of Thomas Gray’s well-known “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), a pastoral meditation on the undistinguished but not undignified lives of rural dwellers:

Far from the madding [that is, frenzied] crowd’s ignoble strife,

Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;

Along the cool sequester’d vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Hardy’s novel hardly presents characters whose “sober wishes never learned to stray”; indeed, misdirected and thwarted desires are the very stuff of the novel’s drama. But he nevertheless gives his rural characters the kind of dignity and humanity that Gray commemorates in his pastoral elegy and that Hardy was bestowing on a new fictional domain based on his native Dorset. 

The borrowed lines from Gray’s poem may be said to act as a generic marker for Far from the Madding Crowd in that many of the basic elements of plot, characterization, setting, and imagery in Hardy’s novel can be directly linked to the traditions of the literary pastoral. In Far from the Madding Crowd, as in the pastoral tradition generally, humanity lives largely in harmony with nature, and the year is marked by the natural rhythms of the seasons and the labors of agricultural life. In order fully to appreciate the novel as a manifestation of pastoral, it is necessary briefly to review the long literary tradition to which it belonged.

The pastoral tradition in European literature began with the Idylls of the third-century B.C. Greek writer Theocritus, whose poems often focused on the simple lives and loves of shepherds and goatherds, nostalgically recalled from the writer’s native Sicily. The rural subjects of Theocritus’ verse included musical and poetic contests, mythological narratives, seasonal celebrations, and elegiac laments. The tradition of classical pastoral poetry was further elaborated by the first-century B.C. Roman writer Virgil in his ten Eclogues, based on Theocritan models, as well as the Georgics, a four-part didactic poem on the required labors of the agricultural year regarding crops, trees, vines, livestock, and bees. Following Virgil, an implicit assumption of pastoral poetry was that rural life was morally superior to urban civilization. Pastoral literature was revived in the English Renaissance in the work of three of the era’s leading writers:

Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), a medley of twelve poems based on Virgil’s Eclogues and featuring song contests, elegies, laments of scorned lovers and frustrated poets, and criticisms of corruption in the late-sixteenth-century English church and state; Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), a long prose narrative, set in an imaginary Greek provincial realm, combining chivalric romance with traditional pastoral interludes, and structured around the principle of rustic retreat from the outside world; and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (c.1600), a romantic comedy representing the sentimental benefits— and ironic deficiencies— of withdrawal to a sylvan retreat, the imaginary Forest of Arden, from the perilous environs of the court. Pastoral poetry continued to be written through the eighteenth century by Alexander Pope and others, but at the risk of becoming artificially restricted to the classically defined rules of the era. Although anticipated in some of the poetry of Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, and George Crabbe, it was only with William Wordsworth’s re-creation of the pastoral using realistic rural characters and simplified diction that the tradition was renewed and made available to Hardy’s influential precursor George Eliot in her novels Adam Bede (1859) and Silas Marner (1861), and then to Hardy himself, beginning with his second novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), the title of which was based on a line from a song in As You Like It.

In essence, literary pastoral presents an idealized portrait of rural life, in the process offering a systematic preference for country over city life, simplicity over complexity, nature over artifice, and tradition over innovation. Explicitly named after the shepherds who formed its first subject matter, pastoral poetry often traced the romantic aspirations and disappointments of simple herders of sheep and goats, whose outdoor work allowed time for music, especially on the panpipes or flute, song contests, and debate on various sentimental, agricultural, political, and folkloric topics. The English pastoral novel of the nineteenth century blended some of the idealized themes and motifs of classical and Renaissance pastoral tradition with the more realistic contemporary conditions of the English rural community and natural landscape.

In writing Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy combined many of the basic themes and motifs of classical pastoral tradition, but synthesized them with a realistic portrayal of contemporary rural English life. The novel’s grounding in pastoral tradition appears in the various farm laborers who perform a choral role in the narrative and exemplify the symbiotic existence of nature and humanity in the novel. It is also evident in the novel’s major characters: the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak; his “mistress,” the beautiful but capricious farm owner Bathsheba Everdene; her love-sick older admirer, the gentleman farmer William Boldwood; and her selfish, predatory husband, Sergeant Troy, a disruptive antipastoral figure in the novel. In keeping with the seasonal structure underlying some examples of the literary pastoral, the action of the novel mirrors the seasons, as seen, for example, in Oak’s loss of his sheep in the winter, Boldwood’s preliminary courtship in the spring, Bathsheba’s involvement with Troy in the summer, and Fanny Robin’s death in the fall. Also indicative of the pastoral tradition in the novel are the descriptions of the phases of the agricultural year, including lambing, sheepshearing, hay-cutting, beekeeping, and harvesting, as well as of the rural institutions of market and fair.― Jonathan A. Cook’s Introduction to Far From the Madding Crowd.

 This timeless story of Bathsheba’s choices and passions explores the nature of relationships and love – as well as the human ability to overcome hardships through resilience and perseverance. FoxSearchlight Presents: ―

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd Quotes