Blue Jasmine Woody Allen (USA 2013)
Cate Blanchette
Viewed Tyneside Cinema 2nd
Oct 2013 Ticket £8.20
Blue Jasmine got me thinking about
clowns.
In the Music Halls when disaster struck
the cry would go up: “Bring on the clowns!” The idea being that
clowns would divert the audience’s attention from whatever it was,
that had gone wrong. Treating the funny men and women as a
distraction does less than justice to their artistry and genius. In
particular those who have dominated cinema such as Chaplin and
Keaton, whose ranks also include Woody Allen.
But Cinema today has less space for the
wise fool. They are crowded out by films that exploit either
spectacle or emotions or desires.
Films of course are signs of the times.
They say something about the states of mind and psychic moods that
underlie the social matrix. The tsunami of apocalyptic films
flooding over our cinema screens attests to the insecurities and
fears that characterise our world.
And then there’s films like Woody
Allen’s latest movie Blue Jasmine. It doesn’t really seem to know
what it is. Perhaps appropriate in that it mirrors a society where
many people don’t know who they are. Also, like many of us, it is a
film that would like to be taken seriously. Indeed the final shot of
it’s A list star Cate Blachette sitting in a public place without her
make up and showing her age, stakes out Blue Jasmine’s claim to be a
drama, perhaps even a tragedy. But the problem is that the preceding
hour and a half of its footage have made any such claims ridiculous.
Comparisons have been made between the
plot line of Tennessee Williams’ Street Car named Desire and Blue
Jasmine. Comparisons have been made between butter and margarine.
Time usually sorts these things out; and as with butter and
margarine, any comparison between Blue Jasmine and Street Car is a
case of at best an errant judgement; at worst a cynical marketing
ploy.
Williams play, filmed in 1951, is a
testosterone soaked wake up call to America about the dangers of the
delusional states of sentimentality pedalled by Hollywood and Madison
Avenue. Tennessee Williams pitched Streetcar at post war audiences
who had not yet totally embraced the consumerist ethos. The
collective psyche was at a turning point and audiences were prepared
to hear out Williams play. But whatever understanding you had of
Streetcar, it was not an advert. Williams was not selling anything.
It was a moral statement.
In contrast Blue Jasmine looks and
feels like a life style advertisement; and it is assembled in a
similar way to those adverts for glossy consumer products that
preceded it on the screen. Like a advert or a cake for that matter
Blue Jasmine is an assemblage of a number of key ingredients. The
Hollywood recipe says: mix into the script one good looking lead
actress on whom to hang the story; add sexy locations – New York San
Francisco; fold in moody music in the form of a sultry jazz sound
track, and sprinkle with products flaunting a pantheon of desirable
consumer goodies: BMW Dior Versace etc. Blue Jasmine is a product
of a mass communication industry where material desire is now the
bed rock of an audience’s expectations.
Blue Jasmine is styled like a
commercial so how does it work dramatically? It’s flashback
structure, which seems de rigour for lazy film-makers at the moment,
is flabby and delivers little tension as it builds up to the big
revelation that Jasmine it was who shopped No pun intended) her
husband to the Feds. As a wannabe tragedy Blue Jasmine poses as a
morality fable based on the Bernie Madoff story, (Jasmine’s husband
Hal even has a passing resemblance to Bernie and I wonder if Woody
lost a bundle of money in Bernie’s Ponzi swindle). But the ethical
posturing of Blue Jasmine is not strong enough to overcome its
stylistic provenance. That last shot, onto which so much is staked,
the naked face of the A lister, is supposed to flag that Cate’s
character, Jasmine is paying the price for her collusive badness, as
she descends into alcohol fuelled madness. But her wretched
condition doesn’t seem to be the result of any personal moral crisis,
any moment of confronting the truth about herself. Her downfall is
not the consequence of her self condemnation. Her madness is the
result of her loss of her enviable life style and a failure of her
make-over as she tried to pass herself off as an innocent. The
lesson of Blue Jasmine is that if you collude in your husband’s
criminality, even if you find out he’s cheating on you, don’t shop
him to the cops,or you’ll lose everything.
Ok so Blue Jasmine is a drawn out life
style promo which is unconvincing as a drama. But none of this would
matter very much if it were funny. Blue Jasmine is not very funny.
The issue of its unfunniness goes right to the core of the assembly
of the film. Cait Blanchette has all the qualities needed to sell
the movie. But she is not a clown. And Woody Allen’s scripts
usually demand a clown, as the lead roles are alter egos of Woody
himself, and and without a clown they don’t work: it’s like Hamlet
without the Prince.
Woody Allen as a performer was a
natural clown, and the clown corresponds to a certain sort of
archetype. The clown courts disaster without meaning to and always
find themselves in the shit; clowns always falls flat on their face
because they think they can do something very very well, but can’t do
it at all; and clowns fail to understand the situation they are in.
The clown’s face mirrors their mental state: alert idiocy,
irrepressible optimism, and well meaning if occasional malicious
incompetence. Allen and Diane Keaton were funny because they were
clowns who knew how to work the clown material. Cate Blanchette
lacks this gift. In consequence her relations in the film with Ginger
and her boyfriends lack bathos; the running gags about her work and
relationships as a dental receptionist are clumsy and vacuous.
Without the clown persona Blue Jasmine
is reduced to being a plodding stylised comedy of manners, a genre
which it doesn’t fit. I say “Bring back the the clowns!”
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
