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Sunday, September 1, 2013

Sunday Review: Blue Jasmine

Why does Jasmine have the blues?

By Jonathan Price

Woody Allen’s new film, Blue Jasmine, is his best in the last decade, perhaps a return to the heights of emotionally and intellectually challenging films like Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Its title is both name and comment on its central character, played powerfully yet subtly by Cate Blanchett: a character whose given name was Jeanette Francis, but who changed it, like Allen himself changed his, to alter her sense of herself, to create a new identity.
    But we see her in mid-life and mid-flight as her identity has begun to fall apart; in fact, we see her first on a plane talking to a companion who appears to be a relative, and Jasmine is elegantly dressed and appears well-to-do. But like the artificial shot of the plane itself that begins the film, all this is facade. She is not what she seems, and we are constantly trying to figure out just who she is. She has flown to San Francisco to live with her sister Ginger, an analogue or a foil for herself, as the sisters in Allen’s Hannah are for each other. The other passenger on the plane, whom Jasmine seems so intimate with, actually doesn’t know Jasmine and is glad to be rid of her at Baggage Claim; it’s clear that Jasmine talks a lot, about herself, and unfortunately occasionally just to herself, but as if someone else were there. The Louis Vuitton baggage she arrives with and the first class seat she occupies conflict dramatically with her status as a bankrupt with large debts to the government.
    Jasmine and Ginger are actually not biological sisters, both being adopted by the same parents, but both are still searching for themselves and for economic security and social status that would help them define themselves.

    Jasmine appeared to have found this identity in her husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin). Scenes of the two of them continue to intercut with the present motion of the film to give us both background and a sense of Jasmine’s intense memories and regrets. Her self-designating name suggests she is attractive, elegant, and also a bit ephemeral or shallow. She is whisked away from college and any pretense of profession by Hal’s allure: wealth and pedestalization. Despite a few signs that his financier’s wealth may edge against the legal limits, she remains quite pleased with him, especially as he brings diamond trinkets to her in her bubble bath. Hal is one of those figures we have become familiar with in a series of recent films following the fiscal implosion of 2008, from Richard Gere in Arbitrage (2012) to Jeremy Irons in Margin Call (2011).
    The intercuts trace the gradual decline of the Jasmine-Hal relationship and the recurrent evasion of reality necessary for Jasmine to maintain her status: she elides Hal’s discussion of financial evasions and represses a variety of forms of evidence that indicate he is having affairs, one of which Ginger observes in vestige but does not communicate. The climax is the revelation that he plans to marry the au pair, and Jasmine’s reaction (a call to the FBI) reveals that she has intuited his financial manipulations for a long time, but has ignored them as long as he preserved her other illusions. Hal is not only arrested and convicted but commits suicide in prison.
    Jasmine’s illusions and decay are underlined by her pill-popping of Xanax and her swilling of Stoli Vodka direct from the bottle. When reality closes in, we see her periodically holding conversations with an imaginary interlocutor, and those around her begin to look at her strangely. But in this film, surfaces are frequently compelling, and Jasmine continues to dress in Chanel and appears classy enough to attract her San Francisco employer, a dentist, who puts the make on her in the office. She finds him gauche and unappealing. She is attracted to attractive surfaces, so later she falls for the younger, attractive diplomat with a beautiful new home in Marin and an impressive background.
    Still devoted to surfaces, she glamorizes her own past with a decorator’s license and a deceased husband who is not a suicidal criminal. When her lies and her past—simultaneously in the form of Ginger’s ex-husband, Augie—catch up with her, she is doubly unmasked and deserted by her new diplomat lover on the verge of buying her an engagement ring.
    Bereft as her sister reunites with boyfriend Chili, whom she had rejected under Jasmine’s tutelage, Jasmine is left alone on a park bench, extremely well-dressed and still in dialog with herself.

    This tale of two sisters is also a tale of two cultures that inevitably intermingle—the 1% and the 99%, the poor and the rich. The film appears to strike a blow for the poor, who may be struggling and gauche, as in Ginger’s ex-husband Augie and her new lover Chili—but they appear to be earnest and honest and love her. That’s of course an oversimplification, but not by much.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

Please comment

18 comments:

  1. I enjoyed the review of the film. I’m not a big fan of Woody, but I will probably see this one when it comes out on DVD.

    As a side note, my novel Gamal’s Assassin, written under the pen name J Randall and edited by Morris Dean, is free over the Labor Day weekend at the Amazon Kindle store. Over six hundred copies have been down loaded since Friday. If any of your readers are interested, click on the link and take a look.

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    1. Wow, Steve, I like the cover Amazon's using to display this ware—doesn't look like one I designed, that's for sure. I think impactful might be the word to describe what I'm seeing at the Amazon link. Good on you!

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    2. It does leave an impression. Not sure if it's good or bad.

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    3. Well, even an "offputting" impression (if that's the impression the cover might make on some people) could actually be a good one, given that the book is about an assassin—a scary sort of person who puts us all off with our neck hairs rising.

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  2. A very good review, but the movie sounds like a real downer. I'm hard pressed to find a good guy, unless it's Ginger's sap of a husband.

    Steve I will get my Kindle as I enjoyed reading the small amount you post on this blog.

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    1. Ed, do "downer" movies really get a tough guy like you...down? I never suspected that you might prefer "feel-good movies," if that's a fair opposite to "downers."
          Note that I haven't seen Blue Jasmine yet either, and I'm like Steve—won't see it until it's available on DVD. (I don't expect it to be on Netflix instant download anything soon, if ever.)

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    2. Ed, I hope you find a little entertainment in the book. You get your money back if not (grin).

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  3. Thanks, Steve and Konotahe, glad you enjoyed the review. I have to admit a fondness for Woody Allen, though I realize he's a special taste; some of my friends detest his films. Though I thoroughly enjoyed Blue Jasmine, I feel there's been a falling off in the last 3 or 4 films before that. But considering the volume of his production, that kind of record isn't all that bad. And he seems to turn out a film a year.

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  4. I really don't care to see anything by Woody Allen. He is not a role model.

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  5. Reason I do not like Woody is I have worked for over 20 years for children in three countries and when he married a child of his relationship with Mia Farrow, who he was supposed to be an adult figure for, I lost all respect for him. Why should I spend money on him?

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  6. Not to defend the questionable aspects of Allen's relationships, or to justify wasting money on any movie, or to question why anyone would be gullible enough to consider any movie star a role model, but to clarify the facts: the daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, was 21 at the time Allen began a relationship with her. And she was an adopted daughter from Mia Farrow's marriage to Andre Previn, so she was not a "child of his relationship with Mia Farrow."

    The following is excerpted from a Reuters news report in 2012: Allen, now 76, says he's never understood the public's fascination with his relationship with Soon-Yi, now 41. "What was the scandal? I fell in love with this girl, married her. We have been married for almost 15 years now," he told Reuters last year.

    Allen had a most unusual relationship with Farrow in that they had three children together yet never married or even lived together. Again excerpting a Reuters report: "The two of us have so little in common that it always amazes us. We're always marveling on why we threw in our lot together and stayed together as long as we have," Allen said while they were together.

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    1. Thanks, Paul, for replying to "Anonymous."

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    2. You are welcome. Not a big fan of people who don't get their facts straight, and then post their incorrect information anonymously. Not surprisingly, the two often go together.

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  7. thanks! Seems a nice film! I will watch it and then read it (first I want to see it). I was exactly wondering what to watch. I recently watch Woody Allen's Match point.

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    1. I don't think there's anything to read—unless you mean the screenplay.

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  8. [...delayed because "moristotle" was spelled with three letter tees]

    The review posted gives a good synopsis of the plot so I won't repeat that.
        And I will disagree now with the position that writers should be ignored because we disapprove of their personal lives.
        We saw "Blue Jasmine" at the Palm in San Luis Obispo last week. I believe that Woody Allen has drawn on Tennessee Williams's "A Street Car Named Desire" to contrast his characters and his message. However, Williams's portrait of Blanche was far softer than the one Allen gives us of Jasmine (Jeanette). Williams puts Blanche in the mold of Southerners who lamented the passing of the old South without evincing the slightest thought of its real horrors—people who live in a dream world about a past that is fictional. Jasmine does not live in a dream world that is fictional. She lived in a world that is all too real to us, and she can't live without it. It is a world of materialism, conspicuous consumption, and devoid of solid moral substance. She even steers her sister and brother-in-law into parting with the only decent sum of money they will ever have, to appear "smart" and clever to her swindling husband.

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  9. It is a refreshing pleasure to read a comment from someone who is obviously a thinker, instead of prattle from those who merely read, without much emphasis on thought or comprehension.

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    1. Yes, that friend is, and always has been, a thinker—one of the best I have known in my life. Thank you, Paul, for your tribute to him.

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