I can’t help feeling that Woody Allen’s
much lauded new film Blue Jasmine is,
in fact, a sexist load of spew. Literally. After seeing it my mother astutely
observed that it felt, more than anything else, “like two hours of watching
Cate Blanchett vomit”. The whole film was a bit like a cynical glutton’s sweet
shop, with a binge of chronic adultery, avarice and over-prescribed Xanax being
regurgitated depressingly onscreen.
A low point in the film’s scripting
came when Peter Sarsaard’s wealthy but unimaginative politician asked Cate
Blanchett’s aging and hysterical socialite (ah, the graceful subtlety of the
Hollywood gender binary) to come to Vienna with him where he can teach her to
waltz (in what century? It’s like Midnight
in Paris, but without the wit) and she can have “as much chocolate cake and
wine” as she wants. It’s like she is some kind of bulimic dream-catcher that he
can fatten up and hang on his four-poster bed and tie trinkets to. This sounds
like a metaphor but in the context of this film it is meant, once again,
completely literally. Sarsgaard’s character is explicitly interested in
Blanchett’s Jasmine for her beauty, apparent class and sangfroid; Jasmine’s ex,
played by the eminent generic-slimeball-impersonator Alec Baldwin was too busy
shagging other women to even notice her.
If this all sounds distinctly familiar,
it’s because it is. Specifically, the storyline is pilfered (or an “homage” to,
depending on where you stand on a bit of creative plagiarism among cult
celebrities like Allen) from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. While Allen’s cunning update of a
prewritten depressing tragedy to the modern and depressing scenario of the
Bernie Madoff scandal has been celebrated by critics (whose main function is
now apparently just to verbally masturbate over famous actors’ potential Oscar
nominations) no one seems concerned with pointing out that the story is now 70
years out of date.
Allen and his reviewers (a.k.a.
fanboys) seem unaware that not all ‘blue collar’ men are beer-swilling,
emotionally incontinent, abusive “lunks” (yes, that’s courtesy of the Guardian, “lunk”)
and women are now generally accepted not to come on a scale of vain/bitchy/attractive
at one end, down to desperate/poor/unfortunate-looking at the other. On top of
which, the idea that women view love as a sort of security, a way of climbing
the social and financial ladder (at one point Sally Hawkins’ character actually
asks her sister if her new lover is a “step up” from her fiancé) is bizarrely
unrealistic. It feels like these stereotypes haven’t just been regurgitated,
they’ve been ripped unceremoniously from the half-a-century old literary graves
where they lie and resurrected, with some token references to perma-tanned
personal trainers, tacky clothing and computers (which, of course, the women
don’t know how to use) thrown in.
I would go so far as to say that it is
actually an insult to Tennessee Williams, who to his credit wrote
ambiguous and troubled characters of both sexes, to compare these characters to
Blanche, Stanley and Stella. Where in Tennessee Williams we are charmed by a
witty, astute, long-suffering woman who has worked as a school teacher while
watching her family go bankrupt and die off, in Allen’s film we are apparently
supposed to care two hoots about a woman who is cruel, classist, talentless,
invariably unfunny, unintelligent and beige. Lingering close-ups of Cate
Blanchett’s make-up-less face do little to remind us of anything other than the
fact that that is what she has been hired as: a face. Because the greatest
catastrophe that can happen to a woman, as we learnt from Eva Mendes – looking
very unconvincingly drab – in A Place
Beyond the Pines, is to take off their make up. Nothing screams trauma like
a super-model with sweat-patches and bad hair. Right?
And if you were expecting some light
relief from Sally Hawkins’ Ginger, the sister who got unlucky in genes (and
love, and her children, and her work…because in Hollywood, there’s no such
thing as nuance, and don’t you forget it) you’d
be sorely disappointed. There is not a single character in this film who isn’t
cheating on their partner, stealing, lying or basically categorised as a “lunk”
or a “snob” (or both, for good measure).
The only character that treads the line
around this bubble of amoral chaos is Jasmine’s estranged stepson Danny. But
even he gets drug addiction and a retreat into the self-imposed ‘squalor’ of a
second-hand music store to deal with. It bears pointing out here that Allen’s
idea of squalor is, if not working in a music store (horror!) then, in Ginger’s
case, living in a quirky San Francisco apartment with views of the sea. It’s
reminiscent of the classic internal joke in Sex
and the City: that Carrie could possibly afford that apartment and those
clothes off her salary from a single column, or that Phoebe in Friends was renting her central
Manhattan apartment on a masseuse’s salary.
The concerning thing here, though, is that
the Hollywood gloss over issues like poverty and gender stereotypes suggests
that Allen isn’t being quite as satirical as I would like to think you’d have to be to make such a unpleasant
film. The lack of wit and the equally mainstream and old-fashioned carping
against both sexes makes it seem like this might just be how Allen sees the
world… Perhaps I missed the point, or am just ridiculously optimistic about
human nature. But it was my understanding that satire is meant to be both funny
and dark, and Blue Jasmine was just
plain boring.
-RT
