A second official trailer for Carol has arrived, and the most in-depth look at the romantic lesbian film – swoon.

The film, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian novel The Price of Salt, is helmed by out director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) and stars Cate Blanchett as Carol, a socialite housewife who falls in love with a store clerk, Therese (Rooney Mara).

Sarah Paulson also stars, playing Carol’s (Cate Blanchett) best friend, along with Carrie Brownstein, and Kyle Chandler.

This particular trailer features a glimpse at the intimate romance between Carol and Therese, and the series of consequences their affair has on those around them.

Carol’s grounded yet emotional voice-over is giving us serious goose-bumps.

Roll on November 20th, when we’ll all get the chance to experience this beautiful drama for ourselves.

Carol has already seen impressive success at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Watch the trailer below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4z7Px68ywk

WOW! Its here, and its what lesbian dreams are made of – *Swoon* – the Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara led lesbian love story, Carol.

Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 semi-autobiographical novel The Price Of Salt, the film is set against the glamorous backdrop of 1950s New York.

Carol, played by Blanchett, is a married woman who risks everything when she embarks on a romance with a younger department store worker Therese, played by Rooney Mara.

It set critics buzzing with praise at the Cannes Film Festival. On Metacritics, 98% of movie experts gave the film five out of five stars. And now the world has Blanchett pegged for another Oscar, which would be her third after The Aviator and Blue Jasmine.

For direct Todd Haynes, this is just the latest of his feature films to focus on sexual and gender identity. His third film, Velvet Goldmine, focused on bisexual glam rock star in 1970s London. His fourth, Far From Heaven, starred Julianne Moore as a 1950s housewife whose husband (Dennis Quaid) comes out. And his last movie, I’m Not There, starred Blanchett in a gender-bending portrayal of Bob Dylan.

Carol is scheduled for limited release, premiering in the US on 20 November and in the UK on 27 November.

This week Cate Blanchett’s film Carol premieres at Cannes, and we’re all very excited. We’re even more excited to finally see so clips from the film.

The big-screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian cult classic The Price of Salt stars Blanchett as a socialite Carol who falls for a younger shop girl (Rooney Mara). While lesbian pulp novels usually ended in tragedy (it would have been blasphemous to end them in blissful romance) Highsmith broke barriers by doing the opposite. In The Price of Salt the lead falls for a young woman – a department store clerk and artist – and spoiler alert (!) it ends in a way that lets us imagine that the two women end up happy together.

Also read: Cate Blanchett Confirms Her Past Relationships With Women

The original 1952 romance novel (which Highsmith originally published under a pseudonym, having predicted public outrage over the queer storyline) was very popular among lesbians of the time period — not all that surprising, due to the unconventional characters that defied stereotypes.

The clips don’t give much a way in terms of plot, but the two stars coy glances say so much more.

On the film, director Todd Haynes says

In some ways, the event of a gay love story is less surprising every day. But I think love stories are hard to pull off, period. They require external forces that keep the lovers apart.”

Cate is now one of several public women who have spoken about having relationships with women, while also not labelling themselves, much like Miley Cyrus.

While films like 2005’s ‘Imagine Me and You’ and more recent foreign language hit ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ have hit a chord as good queer lady led media. There is generally a stark lack of queer, female representation on our movie screens.

For the sake of both fixing what’s lacking and having the same chances at media representation that heterosexual people do (where boring, trope-y love triangles feature three people of the same gender rather than two), this needs to change. With Hollywood’s ever-changing mind-set and the calls and money of queer media fans making loud noises, things are slowly starting to improve.

One such example is Carol. An upcoming film from filmmaker Todd Haynes, Carol is an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 50s lesbian pulp novel The Price of Salt.

While lesbian pulp novels usually ended in tragedy (it would have been blasphemous to end them in blissful romance) Highsmith broke barriers by doing the opposite. In The Price of Salt the lead falls for a young woman – a department store clerk and artist – and spoiler alert (!) it ends in a way that lets us imagine that the two women end up happy together.

Playing the two leads are Cate Blanchett as Carol and Rooney Mara as the younger woman, whilst Sarah Paulson and Carrie Brownstein (Paulson and Brownstein are both openly queer) play two other women in Carol’s life.

With no trailer and just a fan-made video of on set photos to go on it’s unclear if Carol will simply hint at a happy ending or explicitly say it, but we’ll have to wait and see.

As for what else we know about Carol, there’s reason to believe that it’s in very good hands indeed. Backing the project are Killer Films who are responsible for the Oscar winning film Boys Don’t Cry which was based on the real life story of a trans man, their mini-series Mildred Pierce won Emmys, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award and both of the founders of Killer Films (along with filmmaker Haynes) are all out and proud.

It’s making all the right sounds then and we can expect Carol to be released sometime next year, although we could see sneak previews as soon as January, 2015 at the next Sundance Film Festival.