Cate Blanchett, who always looks like she's up to something...
Don’t you just love Cannes? No, not the red carpet and premiere part (though that’s pretty fine, too), but all the film projects that get announced and sold there. Today we have another: “Carol,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt,” which will star Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska. Deadline says that John Crowley is directing Phyllis Nagy’s script.
Highsmith, who specialized in psychological thrillers, is most famous for “Strangers on a Train” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” both of which have had extremely successful film adaptations. She published “The Price of Salt” under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The book was notorious for its lesbian overtones and Highsmith did not associate herself with it many years later. Deadline describes the plot as “the complex relationship between two very different women in 1950s New York. One, a girl in her 20s working in a department store who dreams of a more fulfilling life, and the other, a wife trapped in a loveless, moneyed marriage.” At the time it was published, the book stood out for having a happy ending, something which usually didn’t happen in “homosexual fiction.”
Wasikowska has “Lawless” and “Stoker” coming out this year, and is also set to film “The Double” and “Madame Bovary.” Blanchett, who has been busy doing a lot of theater over the last few years, will be seen in both “Hobbit” movies, and is in the two Terrence Malick movies that are shooting back to back, “Lawless” and “Knight of Cups” (yes, there are two “Lawless” movies; Wasikowska is in the one that used to be “The Wettest County in the World.”).
