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| English: Woody Allen in concert in New York City. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I went to the new Woody Allen film last night, expecting
something equally delightful as some of his more recent films in praise of
Rome, Paris and particularly Barcelona. Unfortunately this one turns out to be
Woody at his most portentous, commenting, I suppose you could say, on the
corrupt world of the extreme rich.
The film, in its English vesion,
is called Blue Jasmine, and in its
French version, according to ads in today’s French-language newspapers here, Jasmine French (which is an odd use of
the French language, as any Montrealer could tell you.
Frankly, this is not a social
class that particularly interests me, and the way it is portrayed by Allen
never really engaged my belief. Cate Blanchett, it is true, gives a bravura
performance in the leading role of a wife of one of those “masters of the
universe”, as the kings of Wall street like to describe themselves. But she
seems to be a thoroughly stupid woman, shallow to the nth degree, and with a
system of values that leaves her devastated as soon as she finds out what all
her friends have known for years, that her husband is a philandering
scumbag. He is played smoothly by Alec
Baldwin, but we don’t get much chance to find out what makes him tick. Like all
the other characters he is a cardboard character whom one simply cannot get
close to, even as a detached observer to a film.
Their whole value system, completely dominated by
the enormous amounts of money her husband has fraudulently accumulated, is such
as to cancel any sympathy one might have had for this couple.
And it is not assuaged even from the moment we pick her up, gabbing
away, endlessly, about her personal problems, to the stranger who happens to be
sitting next to her in the aircraft. She arrives in San Francisco, is admitted
to the rather working-class home of her adopted sister (both girls have been
adopted, Allen’s way, presumably of justifying their totally different types,
although why that device would be needed is beyond me, since siblings can be
just as diverse as adopted children), and after describing how she has lost
everything, she begins to complain about the service in her first-class seat on
the plane. “First-class?” asks her sister, “and you are totally broke?”
Jasmine (who used to be called
Jeannette, but changed it because she thought it sounded more glamorous)
doesn’t really get her sister’s point, which warns us, I guess, that her
intelligence is somewhat limited. Her
sister is a hard-working mother of two, herself divorced, and we are treated to
a number of flashbacks to fill in the domestic history of these two poor souls.
Jasmine dreams of finding a rich man who will restore all her lost security,
but when someone suggests she could become an interior designer, she sets out
to become that, although first having to attend a course in how to use a computer,
which comes hard for her. Her sister, for her part, has a new boyfriend who was
ready to move in with her until the arrival of big sister from New York, and
eventually Jasmine herself does meet Mr Right, a young diplomat who has just
bought a fabulous new home that he wants her to decorate, and who seems to be
just as shallow and simple as this sophisticated New York woman he regards as a
perfect match. Of course she tells him a lot of lies, which, inevitably, are
discovered,. And at the same time her sister discovers a man who seems perfect,
until she discovers he is already married, a small detail he forgot to mention
to her. Under the impact of losing her diplomat, poor Jasmine sinks deeper than
ever into pill-taking --- I am unable to describe the denouement to all this
nonsense because it seemed so trivial, so lacking in interest, that I lost the
drift long before the end.
If Allen’s purpose was to
illustrate the sickness of this particular class of masters of the universe, I
suppose one could say he succeeded. But he might just as well have been
illustrating the rise and fall of the American empire
However, I fear these were not
his purposes. Rather, one has the impression that this is all presented as a
meaningful human drama. But personally I couldn’t take these slobbering
simpletons seriously. Maybe the time has come for Woody to ease up, relax and
smell the daisies, let at least a year go by that he doesn’t produce something
or other on film. It happens to
everybody, Woody, growing old. Just have to accept it as well as we can manage.
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