Film Review | Blue Jasmine

While it’s often simply more annoying than anything else, the fact that we get films slightly later than the rest of the English-speaking world can sometimes give us an interesting perspective on things… or at least up-end some of the hype and buzz surrounding them.

This means that sometimes we have a choice of watching Oscar winners as opposed to just Oscar nominees. But in the case of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine – for which, incidentally, Cate Blanchett picked up a Best Actress gong – the post-release reputation is far messier.

Just as the film was picking up Oscar race momentum, Allen’s estranged daughter Dylan Farrow rekindled sexual abuse allegations against her father in an open letter, which appeared to attack Allen’s industry peers as much as himself. The ensuing feud was ugly precisely because it was inconclusive: but no matter who you choose to believe, it remains a sad, sordid episode which by rights should not have been allowed to play out in the public arena.

But irrespective of how this episode influences your view of Woody Allen the man (whether you can separate the private man from the filmmaker is another issue), Blue Jasmine itself is eerily pivoted on the same tension between the private and public worlds.

Blanchett is Jeanette ‘Jasmine’ Francis – a former wealthy socialite whose future now hangs in the balance, after her husband, the successful stockbroker Hal (Alec Baldwin) is arrested for Bernie Madoff-style fraud. Unsure of how to turn her life around, Jasmine decides to take temporary residence with her socially (and financially) unassuming sister, Ginger (Sally Hawins) – a divorcee whose former husband, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) had invested a large sum of money to a construction company on Hal’s urging, only for Hal to subsequently lose it.

Finding it near-impossible to scale back on her social and professional standards, Jasmine dreams of becoming an interior designer, taking a job as a dentist’s assistant to pay for her tuition fees. 

But it’s only a matter of time until the brittle hold she has on reality begins to unravel. As her sister undergoes her own personal drama, the past always appears to be ready to leap back and swallow Jasmine up.

Rife with handy coincidences and thin as far as plotting goes, the film is a character study through and through, and it wouldn’t have survived intact were it not for Blanchett’s go-for-broke, blistering turn as the sociopathic black hole that is Jasmine.

That’s not to say that Allen’s easy way with storytelling doesn’t do him any favours here. The supporting cast may lack depth for the most part, and the narrative twists may click too easily into place, but this helps us to concentrate on the whirlwind that Blanchett conducts with an impressive glee.

It also ensures that the luxurious trappings of the society from which she emerges appears to be rendered faithfully and vividly – in flashbacks, cocktail parties populated by fakes but chugging along to an easy, established rhythm position Jasmine in a clearly established world of privilege and plenty, so you understand why being wrenched out of it would feel problematic.

But Jasmine’s neurosis isn’t something that hits her – or, as the flashbacks confirm with each appearance, us as viewers – by surprise. You gradually begin to realise that her husband’s fall from grace was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. Allen and Blanchett ensure that you’re kept on tenterhooks for her next breakdown of freak-out episode.

The film doesn’t really make any major points about either the nature of mental instability or the Wall Street context that fires its plot into motion. Instead we’re made to observe the collapsing psyche of an over-privileged woman for, essentially, sheer entertainment value.

This is not say that it doesn’t work for what it is – social awkwardness has always been Allen’s forte, and it unspools naturally here, providing a cringe-worthy thrill at every turn.

But it would have all been a trifle had Blanchett not pulled all the stops. As ever, Allen remains an actor’s director.