Hollywood is busy adapting Patricia Highsmith’s pre-Lolita 1952 lesbian road trip novel The Price of Salt into a film entitled Carol with Oscar winner Cate Blanchett signed on to play the titular role of a wealthy, older married woman who falls in love with a young woman who works in a department store. Mia Wasikowska, star of The Kids are All Right and Albert Nobbs costars as Therese, the younger woman. If all that weren’t enough to make my lesbian cinephile’s head explode, news broke today that Todd Haynes, the out director of modern queer classics Velvet Goldmine andFar From Heaven (also HBO’s Mildred Pierce), is set to direct, according to IndieWire.
Haynes previously directed Blanchett as a Bob Dylan in 2007’s somewhat experimental biopic I’m Not There.
Highsmith, who had relationships with both men and women throughout her life, according to her biography, pennedThe Price of Salt, originally titled Carol, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan.
Several of Highsmith’s novels have been adapted to film, most famously Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers on a Train and Anthony Minghella’s imagining of The Talented Mr. Ripley, which starred, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Blanchett.
Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt during the heyday of lesbian pulp novels, but her tale, which is often heartbreaking, varied greatly from the bleak outlook of so many pulp novels, offering up a glimmer of hope with its “happy ending,” in which she left it open to the chance that the women could end up staying together.
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