Blue Jasmine

One film stands out above others in my cinema-going this Autumn. Trailed as a return to form for Woody Allen, I feel that Blue Jasmine is quite simply one of his greatest films.

Much has rightly been made of the central performance from Cate Blanchett as the delusional Jasmine. She dominates the film, being both protagonist and narrator. It is her tragic descent from snooty Manhattan nouveau-riche to penniless San Franciscan wannabe that marks the trajectory of the film. Through flashback we find that her rich socialite past was funded by criminal extortion as her husband was a crooked financier, Bernie Madoff style. Then Jasmine turns up on the doorstep of her down-on-her-luck sister and proceeds to arrogantly lead her through a lifestyle makeover. What unfolds is an exquisitely sad cocktail of deliciously comic and ultimately tragic scenes.

Jasmine's arrogance is at the heart of the film. Fuelled by alcahol and prescription drugs, she always knows better than those around her and lets no opportunity pass to tell them so. At first her condescension is comic, over time it becomes grating and eventually tragic. The film ends as it begins, with Jasmine in close-up haranguing someone. Over the course of her fall from grace and her desperate attempts to regain the heights of the American Dream we see that she has learnt nothing. In the end the camera pans away from Jasmine in close-up and we see she is on a park bench talking to no-one but herself. It is self-delusion that has been driving her arrogance.

The filmmaker that Woody Allen most admires is Ingmar Bergman. This is most clear in works such as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) and Husbands and Wives (1992), where he explores human relationships in a much more serious vein than he had previously. In Blue Jasmine he has gone further, making a perfectly balanced tragi-comedy: a bitter-sweet film in which comedy blends almost seamlessly into tragedy (and vice-versa).

Moreover this is an authentically American tragi-comedy in which the core of the American Dream is itself the subject of critical appraisal. Jasmine (a girl adopted into a blue-collar family) believes in this dream and follows it to success, reaping great socio-economic rewards whilst turning a blind eye to her husbands criminality. After that failure and fall from grace she seeks to recapture the dream by hustling (lying, reinventing herself, editing out her inconvenient past). But, at the exact point of her apparent success (getting engaged to a rich upper-class man with political aspirations) she is undone. Outside the jewellers with her prospective husband she is upbraided by a victim of one of her ex-husbands scams who shatters the illusions about her former life that she had created. Even at this point of (seemingly) complete failure she cannot let go of her delusions of grandeur. The tragedy is compounded when she then walks out on her sister (the only refuge she has) and is last seen on a park bench peddling her delusions to no-one but herself.