Who is Woody Allen in Blue Jasmine ?

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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19 October (updated, with a 102-point rating, 20 October; Tweet added 1 January 2015)

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

I was waiting for something to happen - and it never did


Obviously, what is revealed about Jasmine (and to her) in the last ten or so minutes did not count for the person who made this comment - what sort of film was this meant to be in which this elusive 'something' might eventuate ?

Having seen Blue Jasmine (2013) exactly a month ago, on the opening night of Cambridge Film Festival, I was pleased to have watched it again, and pleased for Woody Allen that Screen 2 this Saturday night was sold out. Do I vainly hope for some of those people to go back and see some of the fifty or so other Allen films, whether or not they missed them before ?


If so, I would commend, in addition to the well enough known Annie Hall and Manhattan, these personal favourites :


Interiors (1978)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Love and Death (1975)



Back at the film, and the question posed, I have heard it suggested that Dr Flicker is the person closest to Allen himself (i.e. the parts that he writes for himself to play), and I watched him with that in mind. No, he is not Allen - Allen is, I think, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett).

Tuned to Allen, knowing almost all of his films, and having seen this one before, I could hear his cadences, his little excited rages in this role – not exactly, but Jasmine is the one who approaches his self-expression, his fluidity, his vocabulary and assurance. Listen for him, and I think that you will find his voice in Blanchett’s.

97 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 16

A rating and review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)


Meanwhile, back at the nub, the film is not as dark as Interiors, but it is a drama, and I hope that it is being appreciated for that, though one with the humour that Interiors almost entirely lacks : there are themes in common here, and the Allen who cut up footage of Charlotte Rampling for a vivid portrayal of her distressed state of mind (as Dorrie) in hospital in Stardust has long had, if not themes of mental health, then hints at it, and I respect him immensely for that.

Blanchett almost cannot fail to win something big for this performance, because, for me, it is so easily convincing, so true to the psychology of her life (explored more here) and to the experiences that she has, but I am, if anything, even more delighted at a peach of a role like this for the tremendous Sally Hawkins, who really shows what a versatile actor she is at playing a character who has a capacity to delight in the smaller things and be radiant – Allen had cast her in Cassandra’s Dream, and this new part she carries off perfectly.

As to the story, no, there is no big something, and I did not have to absorb two previous films as at the time of the previous viewing, but I am very pleased to run this one through again and see how beautifully it holds together. When Allen crafts a screenplay, as in Hannah (or Harry, or Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), there is nothing that one would change with it – when, for me, he does not, in Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), it is hard to know where and how one would rescue it.

So my hope is for people to be patient with Jasmine’s story, and the choices that she has made – when she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), she clicks into a fantasy where she has always been called Jasmine, etc., etc., and I could see her entering into straightaway believing things, just because she was saying them and wanted them to be true. We can reach back into the story, and see how much – and, at the same time, how little – she knew about what was happening and what she was doing, and how, as we see her doing all along with prioritizing her needs, she hurts her stepson and husband.

I also hope that they will look out some other Allen, not Midnight in Paris (2011), really, but maybe some of the ones that I have listed; that Hawkins now has the recognition that she deserves; that Allen keeps on with his film every year; and that good film-making like this will be taken to people’s hearts, and cherished.

Where did the Blanche DuBois characterization in Blue Jasmine (2013) really originate... ? : https://t.co/grhg1tGL9g Bananas (1971)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2015

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

No scope for error

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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27 July


* Contains spoilers *


Which film combines elements of all these others ? :

* Love and Death (1975)

* Match Point (2005)

* Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

* Broadway Danny Rose (1984)


Films from four decades that have influenced Scoop (2006), from the ending of the first to the patter and character of Danny Rose in the last. It’s a conceit that could easily have come from Woody Allen’s short prose (or the works of Henry James ?) that a respected journalist, hearing of a juicy story when he has died, fights his way back from death to make sure that it is followed up and told : equally, though Hamlet senior has more of an interest in what he tells to Hamlet junior than Joe Strombel (Ian McShane) does in what he says to Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), there is obviously a long history of crimes being told of from beyond the grave.

Combining that impulse with Allen’s boyhood interest in magic – as portrayed in films such as Radio Days (1987) and Stardust Memories (1980) – through a meeting in a magic cabinet, and one is close to the world of Alice (1990). The intrigue, the tension, come from the middle two films, though, and this almost seems like a re-make of Match Point, with more aristocratic families, plotted killing, and a woman who has become a nuisance with her demands set against a pattern of murder.

Not such a great pair as Allen and Diane Keaton (some of those scenes from Sleeper and Manhattan Murder have me smiling as I think of them and the pair’s bunglingly lucky work), Johansson and he do well enough as sleuths, with Allen not trying very hard to keep himself out of it. He has written himself into the film as Splendini (alias Sidney Waterman), an illusionist, washing his clothes in a launderette whilst he stays who knows where to be in London to do his show – a hilarious come-down for a man passed off, for investigative purposes, at swanky parties as a successful businessman in property or oil.

The bamboozling that we know from Danny and Larry Lipton (or, for that matter, C. W. Briggs in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)) is to the fore, and, just as Midnight in Paris (2011) has us take as read that Gil somehow goes back in the past, so Allen casually has us entertain the possibility that Death, with his scythe, may not give all due attention to his charges and that Strombel gets away from him. (The set-up also provides us with a neat closing joke.)

Looked at in Allen's career, from a man with an obviously fake ginger beard taking over a Latin American country to Leonard Zelig, The Human Chameleon, to an actor descending from the silver screen, an element of the fantastical has long been part of his film-making. Here, it adds a jaunty edge of Death being cheated that lightens a story-line that could be that of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant with the secret in the basement in Notorious - even if that was not a deliberate outright steal, the sense of homage is there, the eternal feel of a woman snooping whilst she hopes that a man sleeps, but what if he catches her, what of the danger that she is in ?

Here, that sense of danger passes itself to Sid when Sondra has been persuaded all too easily of Peter Lyman's (Hugh Jackman's)innocence (not how I imagined it spelt (Leimann), but what's in a name ?) - echoes of Manhattan Murder, where Diane Keaton (as Carol Lipton) will not let go of teasing away at the contradictions in Paul House (Jerry Adler) and frustrating her husband's (Allen's) desire to let things lie.

And all of this pulls pretty much in the right direction, with romance, intrigue, a murderer on the loose, and Johannson at risk. We even have a slight echo, right at the end, of the indestructible Alex Forrest, dripping water as she proves her continued existence. Waterman gives us a light ending, just as with Love and Death, and there are just a few niggles. One, choosing to drive to where Johannson is with Jackman, is explicable by a district of police and of authority, otherwise they could simply have been summoned and arrived more promptly.

Another is less clear : if one knew that a sensitive room with coded entry had already been entered, would one not have changed the combination, and, in removing one incriminating set of papers, have left another item in its place ? Finally, would one really be on solid ground in thinking that people would appear unrelated when they had posed as father and daughter as guests at several parties ?

Those minor quibbles can themselves be addressed by thinking of the character and self-belief of Lyman, who really had no reason to think that Waterman would talk his way into Lyman's home in his absence and could easily have persuaded himself that - however the woman whom he thought of as Jade had gained access - she had wholly fallen for him and that she posed no threat.

After all, he acts as he does at the end because he has believed a lie about rescuing her from drowning, whereas he thinks that he is exploiting a weakness, and he has dared to seek to blame his act of self-liberation on someone else. That is very much as Chris Wilton does in Match Point by staging a burglary, and, despite cocking up the plan, getting away with it (albeit in a sub-Raskolnikovian sort of way, haunted by ghosts) - departing from that model, Allen has him caught out, and his arrogant belief in his evil ways out of being discovered proving misconceived.

The better thought-out script, the mixture of themes, of light and darkness, makes this a better film than that earlier one, for all its box-office success. Allen in the film gives some great moments, although one can already see how the style of almost improvisatory delivery that is to the fore in To Rome with Love (2012) has become heightened to the stage where, for example, he seems to take forever, after the last murder, to claim to be a newspaperman man on the search for information : I wonder whether Allen, perhaps not just wanting to deliver one-liners, is too much conveying the sense not just of a man looking for the right words (as a contrast to Sidney with the assurance and vocabulary of schmoozing the volunteers and audience in his act), but of one with whom we might find ourselves getting frustrated, wishing that he would spit it out.


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KST with a Yorkshire cousin

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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3 April

* NB Spoiler City : What follows is not a review as such, and takes as read that the film has been watched and its plot is no surprise *

The closing shot of the film, before a screen comes across from left and right to meet at the point where a double shooting has taken place, shows a two-storey building with eight (or ten ?) sets of French doors onto balconies. Dusk has somehow fallen, and the lit-up windows are mini-screens or stages on which we witness dancing, sex, etc., and, in one case, first a man and then a woman being shot (top, second from left). Other stories for Scheherazade to tell...

The opening shots were of a boy of around sixteen dressing, first his muscular torso with no head, and he will turn out to be Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), but, by the time of the closing shot, we may even have forgotten how the film started, such has been our journey, circumscribed and maybe claustrophobic as its locations have been :

* In and around the Lycée Gustave Flaubert

* The flat of Germain (Fabrice Luchini) and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas)

* In and around the house of what comes to be called that of 'the Raphas' (Denis Ménocet (Rapha Artole père), Emmanuelle Seigner (Esther), and Bastien Ughetto (fils))

* In and around the gallery that Jeanne runs (and thinks of as hers), Labyrinthe du Minotaur (with all its echoes of Theseus and Ariadne, Minos, Pasiphaë, and Dædalus)

* Approaching and inside the complex that contains the basketball court

* Queuing outside and in the cinema

* Finally, just outside the Germains' flat (after we have been shown Garcia's house and him on a bus to the former)


That is the entire compass, I believe, of In the House (Dans la Maison) (2012), but one may not have realized as much in watching. Our cast, too, is quite narrow beyond those mentioned, being Anouk (the school's secretary), the headmaster, the twins Rosalie et Eugénie (both played by Yolande Moreau), and Bernard, the maths teacher whose test Germain 'steals'.


I hypothesize that :

* French forms of greeting apart, Germain and Anouk are (or have been) more intimate than just colleagues

* Even before the events unfold, nobody atthe school much liked Germain, who may have been reactionary (or otherwise caused conflict with authority)

* Jeanne has probably thrown herself into the gallery both because childless, and because of Germain's relative lack of interest in her and what she does (and maybe she, in her turn, was intimate with the former gallery owner Bruno, whose funeral Germain early does not attend, calling it 'a mass')

* Maybe some (or all) of this does not exist outside Germain's head in the present of the film, for the following reasons :


(1) As with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Germain is fascinated by Garcia because of the latter's writing, and is a Germain Germain, seeking, as Humbert does, to be untruthful to himself about what the fascination is

(2) If Garcia = Germain, Germain projecting his desire and drive for good writing onto another part of himself that concocts an enticing supply (after all, although what he takes to be the inventiveness (if it is not autobiographical) of Garcia's writing keeps him interested, the writing itself (at best) shows promise, not great genius), he can distance himself psychologically, by entering a psychotic experience, from any or all guilt for attacking his wife, humiliating 'a learner', and stealing the maths test

(3) For all that we know, the return to school (and the announcement of the reintroduction of school uniform, complete with the prurience of seeing Garcia dressing) onwards is imagined, because Germain has already been suspended (and maybe is already at the Institut de la Verrière, the psychiatric provision where his other, younger, more promising self (Garcia) visits him) - the scene, shown to us and which Garcia tells him that he watched, with learners in everyday clothes strikes a strange note, which might suggest the unreality of the uniformed scenes

(4) If so, then he tells himself a story of his own being drawn in (perhaps as to the centre of a labyrinth, Ariadne's (Garcia's) string taking him to face the Minotaur monster at the heart of him / his life) to excuse the three culpable acts listed in (2), above, and to provide his internal rationale for being led on and on, as if like Macbeth or Othello, to his destruction

(5) Esther Artole tells Claude Germain that his thinking that he loves her is 'in his head' and irréelle, and he is only in proximity to her by having, in part, helped her son Rapha with unreal numbers (such as the square-root of -2) : if Germain is - as Beckettt says about his prime character in Company - devising it all for company, then his neglect of Jeanne becomes Claude's interest in getting close to and seeking to seduce Esther (with all her Old Testament echoes in a book of her own)


On quite another level, the film seems to present itself to us much like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, trying to piece together the puzzle of what is happening in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and there is often its playful feeling to the unfolding of each instalment from Garcia and its reception by the Germains. On another, Garcia is not unlike the son in Benny's Video (1992), or another schemer in the rather dire Bel Ami (2012) (not to mention The Imposter (2012)).

If, though, Germain had his admission, prior to (on a 'straight' reading) or during which (on a reading where, as Germain showed on the blackboard, the conflict is within) Garcia is the internal enemy (= the younger writer who Germain once was, back to haunt him, but at the same time intrigue him), the film has a different character that fits the ending.

Perhaps consumed by his failure as a writer and being but a teacher (just as Jeanne's biological 'failure' may have caused her to seek a career), we may see Germain spurred to fond imaginings that turn toxic and bring / have brought his downfall, a little in the same way that a noise that we hear in sleep incorporates itself into a dream and then, at what seems a remove of time, appears to wake us.


Interestingly, I have now seen a variant of the landscape poster that is in @CamPicturehouse on Neil White's (@everyfilmteled's) web-site, which shows Garcia next to Germain on a bench, with the Rapha house foregrounded (and even with a Narnia-style lamp-post, which, rather, reminds me of Magritte and his anarchic Empire of Light paintings)...

We cannot see Garcia's face, but just look at the expression on Germain's, regarding him !


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