A good movie

Since it was the last movie directed by Todd Haynes that I haven’t seen so far and since it was a critical success when it was released, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, at least, it was more straightforward than ‘Poison’, Haynes’s directorial debut, but it still turned out to be a tricky movie to decipher though. Indeed, what was it all about after all? To be honest, I’m not really sure. The best I can come up with was that it was dealing with the upper-class suburban malaise syndrome. Indeed, if you have pretty much everything you ever wanted, if you don’t have a job to make yourself useful, if you don’t really have a hobby or a passion, if you don’t have kids to take care of (she did have a step-son but she clearly didn’t seem to be really involved in his life though), what do you have to really look for in life then? I also noticed that they kept mentioning AIDS rather randomly and the way Carol looked towards the end possibly made her look like a AIDS patient but, on the other hand, she wasn’t promiscuous and she didn’t do drugs, so this link seemed rather far-fetched to me though. Anyway, this whole ‘environmental illness’ was so weird and intriguing at the same time. Indeed, on one hand, it did seem like a hoax but, on the other hand, it could be also plausible. In fact, for years, up until I was about 14 years old maybe, I would get pretty sick when I was standing next to my parent’s cars just by inhaling the car fumes/odor. It did seem to be really psychosomatic though and I wonder why she went to see only once a psychiatrist but, obviously, it wasn’t the point of this movie. Anyway, it was impressive how completely different this directorial follow-up was for Haynes if you would compare it to ‘Poison’. Another impressive thing was Julianne Moore who gave here such a subtle and complex performance. She and Haynes would keep working together for another 4 movies over 3 decades (I especially enjoyed their latest collaboration ‘May December’ but ‘Far from Heaven’ was also a big critical success). Anyway, to conclude, even if it was quite a challenging movie, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Todd Haynes’s work.