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

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