Jasmine (Blanchett), a deeply troubled New York socialite brought low by a devastating scandal in her very recent past, arrives in San Francisco to stay with her adoptive sister Ginger (Hawkins). Ostensibly, she`s in town to recover her footing, to re-build her shambles of a life. Instead, she trails chaos in her wake, upsetting Ginger`s happy romance with boyfriend Chili (Cannavale) even as she wanders through the Bay Area in a haze of drugs, drink and depression.
What`s so disarmingly great about Blue Jasmine is how it only very rarely feels like one of Allen`s films. In fact, he merrily subverts audience expectations to make a few rather devastating points about Jasmine and the world she`s leaving behind her. He shoots the scenes that reach into her past in characteristic jaunty style, cranking up the jazzy swing numbers that have long made up the soundtrack of his films. This locates Jasmine and her wealthy husband Hal (Baldwin) firmly in the richly romanticised Manhattan of many of Allen`s movies a rarefied environment in which witty repartee and easy privilege mask the darker realities of life.
In contrast, the majority of the film, which is set in San Francisco, comes almost completely free of musical accompaniment. In this most subtle of ways, Allen draws a stark, effective parallel between Jasmine`s old life and her new one: the place where she first lost her senses, and where she`s struggling to regain them. There`s a heartbreaking chill to watching Jasmine try to adapt to a lifestyle several rungs below what she`s accustomed to on the social scale one that evokes pity and revulsion in almost equal measure.
Even more intriguingly, Allen breaks with his own tradition in fixing his camera and script so firmly on the character of Jasmine. He`s reached a point in his long and storied career when his characters feel less like people than archetypes, each movie either revolving around or featuring a nervous, paranoid, death-obsessed Jewish man loosely based on himself (whether or not he actually plays the part).
Jasmine is something altogether different, a woman trapped within and by her own choices in life. As Allen scrapes away the sleek gloss of wealth encasing Jasmine, he uncovers an utterly fascinating character: vibrant, vital, and powerfully determined, yet also hollow, broken and almost hopelessly lost. Jasmine is quite literally a self-made woman, someone who, as Ginger observes, excels at “looking the other way, disregarding anything that doesn`t fit into her meticulously crafted image of herself and her life.
It should come as no surprise that Blanchett always reliably magnificent in every role she plays is brilliant. Even so, the black magic she weaves in bringing Jasmine to life is truly astounding. Never one to allow vanity to compromise her performances, Blanchett delights in the moments when Jasmine loosens her grip on her sanity and her mask of careful, polished beauty slips a little. Watch for an intimate moment in a diner, when Jasmine is babysitting her nephews and regaling them with stories of her glorious past. It`s impossible to spot the precise moment when her luminous radiance cracks and withers to reveal the broken, callous, selfish monster of a human being cowering beneath. All the more impressively, Blanchett makes this sad, wilful, frustrating creature terrifyingly, powerfully sympathetic no small feat considering Jasmine`s out-sized sense of entitlement and frequently foolish decisions and actions.
Allen is well-known for acquiring muses, so to speak: he`s crafted scripts around the likes of Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz. On the evidence of Blue Jasmine, it would be an enormous shame if Blanchett doesn`t join his pantheon of screen goddesses on a permanent basis. It`s very much her devastating performance that holds Allen`s entire film together, allowing it to flit effectively from character study to socio-economic satire and back again. Allen`s script is actually less sharp than it could be, failing to do real justice to the otherwise fantastic Hawkins who is relegated to a sidekick role that doesn`t have quite the depth it should. But, thanks to Blanchett, Blue Jasmine easily counts amongst Allen`s best films while setting itself apart from them in a most welcome and fascinating way.
Summary: A fine bouquet.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Shawne Wang