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| Cate Blanchett is a sensual seductress in Carol |
CATE BLANCHETT's new lesbian love story Carol with Rooney Mara is based on the controversial novel by Partricia Highsmith – watch the first seductive trailer here.
Cate Blanchett is being tipped for her THIRD Oscar win for her dazzling portrayal of an older woman falling in love with a young salesgirl.
The Australian star plays the title character in Todd Haynes's adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel.
The crime writer published the book (also known as The Price of Salt) under a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, due to the scandalous nature of a love story between two women in 1950s America.
Carol is a wealthy socialite who falls for a 19-year-old department store clerk Therese (Rooney Mara). Both their lives spiral out of control as their passion ignites.
The film received a standing ovation at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, before Mara also walked away with the coveted best actress gong.
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| Cate Blanchett as Carol in her new film |
WATCH THE FIRST TRAILER FOR CAROL NEXT:
The one-minute trailer is full of loaded glances and lingering touches between Blanchett and Mara who meet in a department store over Christmas and begin a secret friendship.
Carol is an alluring woman trapped in a loveless, convenient marriage while Therese is a clerk working in the Manhattan store who dreams of a more fulfilling life.
As passion blossoms between the lonely beauties, they are faced with losing everything they hold dear when an unaccepting world learns of their forbidden love.
Acclaimed thriller writer Highsmith, herself, only acknowledged the book much later in her career, and admitted that it drew heavily upon her own life.
Even so, many of her novels, including the Mr Ripley quartet and The Two Faces of January, draw upon an unsettling and fluid representation of love, desire and sexuality.
WATCH A PREVIEW SCENE AS CAROL BEGINS HER SEDUCTION OF THERESE NEXT:
"As the one novel outside the crime milieu of Patricia Highsmith's incredibly prolific career, it spoke directly to the criminal mentality in that sort of overheated hothouse of the amorous imagination that is always in a state of producing outcomes, run-ins, scenarios," says director Haynes.
"What's going to happen with the same kind of urgency and paranoia that the criminal mind weaves its webs or whatever, and I dug that.
"I thought it was so great and then, of course, the love itself is against the law, is a crime."
The film also stars Kyle Chandler as Carol's husband, Harge, and Sarah Paulson as her intimate friend, Abby.
Openly gay Haynes previously examined similar territory in 2002's Far From Heaven.
In the film, Julianne Moore's 1950s suburban housewife discovers that her husband (Dennis Quad) has fallen in love with their black male gardener.
Carol is the second collaboration between Haynes and Blanchett, who last joined forces to play with gender and identity in his 2007 exuberantly experimental I'm Not There, in which she inhabited one of that movie's multiple Bob Dylans.
Blanchett won the Best Actress Oscar last year for Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Katherine Hepburn in 2004's The Aviator.
CAROL will be released in cinemas on November 27.
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