Blue Jasmine (2013)
Film Overview
After the collapse of her wealthy New York life, Jasmine French arrives in San Francisco to stay with her sister and attempts to rebuild a future while remaining psychologically trapped inside the past she has lost.
Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine, formerly married to financier Hal, played by Alec Baldwin. Their affluent Manhattan life has disappeared after the exposure of Hal’s financial crimes, leaving Jasmine without the money, status or certainty that once defined her.
She moves into the modest San Francisco apartment of her sister Ginger, played by Sally Hawkins. Ginger’s life could hardly be further from Jasmine’s former world, particularly through her relationship with Chili, played by Bobby Cannavale.
The film moves continually between Jasmine’s present in California and memories of New York, gradually revealing how much she understood about Hal’s behaviour and how the collapse of their marriage affected everyone around them.
Andrew Dice Clay plays Ginger’s former husband Augie, whose own financial hopes were damaged by Hal. Peter Sarsgaard appears as Dwight, a diplomat whose apparent sophistication offers Jasmine the possibility of recreating something close to the social life she has lost.
Javier Aguirresarobe photographs San Francisco and the New York flashbacks with a visual distinction subtle enough to allow past and present to coexist inside Jasmine’s increasingly unstable perception of her life.
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My Review
When the life you built disappears but the person you invented remains
Blue Jasmine is dominated by one of the greatest performances in any Woody Allen film. Cate Blanchett makes Jasmine exhausting, funny, cruel, frightened and deeply sad, often within the same scene.
Jasmine has lost almost everything except the habits created by wealth. She no longer has the apartment, money or marriage, but she still behaves as though ordinary life is an administrative error somebody will eventually correct.
That makes her arrival in Ginger’s San Francisco apartment immediately uncomfortable. Jasmine needs help from the sister whose life she has spent quietly judging.
She has been forced down the social ladder without acquiring any corresponding humility.
Jasmine has lost the money but not the reflex of assuming she belongs somewhere more expensive.
Sally Hawkins is crucial because Ginger prevents the film from becoming trapped entirely inside Jasmine’s version of reality.
Ginger’s life is messy, modest and emotionally complicated, but it contains things Jasmine’s expensive world often did not: practical affection, friendships and people willing to say exactly what they think.
Jasmine interprets Chili largely through class. Bobby Cannavale makes him loud, physical and sometimes difficult, but he is also considerably more honest about what he wants than most of the people in Jasmine’s former life.
The sisters therefore judge one another from completely different definitions of success.
The flashbacks gradually destroy Jasmine’s preferred version of her marriage. Hal was charming, wealthy and socially effortless, but his success depended on fraud and his private life on repeated deception.
Alec Baldwin is perfectly suited to the role because Hal’s confidence makes dishonesty look almost administrative. He does not behave like a man worried that his entire world could collapse.
Jasmine’s responsibility remains deliberately uncomfortable. She may not have known every detail, but she also benefited from a system whose workings she often preferred not to examine.
The film refuses the easy version in which she is either completely innocent or fully complicit.
Jasmine’s tragedy is not simply that Hal lied to her. It is that the lies were easier to live with while they were paying for the apartment.
Andrew Dice Clay’s Augie gives that moral question a face. Money entrusted to Hal disappeared, taking with it a chance for Augie and Ginger to improve their own lives.
Jasmine once viewed their ambitions from the comfortable distance of somebody who had far more. After the collapse, she finds herself financially closer to them than she ever expected.
Yet she still struggles to see the damage from their perspective. Her own loss occupies so much psychological space that the losses experienced by other people remain secondary.
That is one reason Blanchett’s performance is so extraordinary: Jasmine can be genuinely suffering while simultaneously behaving appallingly.
Peter Sarsgaard’s Dwight appears almost like the answer Jasmine has been waiting for. He is sophisticated, politically connected and belongs to a social world she understands.
Rather than rebuild from the reality of her present life, Jasmine begins constructing another story about herself. The details she gives Dwight are edited until they support the future she wants.
For a while, it works. She can dress properly, attend the right places and perform the person she used to be.
The difficulty is that the past has not disappeared merely because Jasmine has changed the version of it she tells.
Dwight offers Jasmine a future, but she can only enter it by rewriting the past. Eventually the original version catches up.
The use of memory is one of the film’s greatest formal strengths. Allen does not present the New York material as neat flashbacks announced by dates or transitions.
Jasmine seems to fall into the past while standing in the present. A sentence, song or emotional pressure can bring Hal back into the room.
That makes the structure psychological rather than chronological. We learn what happened when Jasmine is capable — or incapable — of keeping herself from remembering it.
The past becomes another location she still inhabits.
The soundtrack makes that especially clear through Blue Moon. Jasmine connects the Rodgers and Hart song with meeting Hal, and it becomes part of the story she tells about the beginning of their life together.
Conal Fowkes’s performance has exactly the slightly distant romantic quality the memory requires.
Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Jimmie Noone and other early jazz recordings surround the film, but Blue Moon is the emotional key because Jasmine keeps returning to it as though the right song might restore the right version of history.
It cannot.
Blue Moon is not merely Jasmine’s favourite song. It is the soundtrack to the story she still wants her marriage to have been.
San Francisco is an inspired setting because it gives the present a geography completely separate from the vanished New York life.
Ocean Beach, neighbourhood restaurants and Ginger’s smaller apartment feel exposed and practical beside the polished spaces of Jasmine’s memory.
When Dwight enters the story, the visual world begins moving towards expensive houses and social environments where Jasmine can once again perform confidence.
Aguirresarobe allows the city to remain beautiful without making it a fantasy. For Jasmine, San Francisco is not somewhere she chose. It is where reality has put her.
The ending is devastating because it removes the final social structure around Jasmine. The new future has collapsed, Ginger has returned to her own life and Jasmine is left sitting in public, talking to herself.
There is no grand punishment or revelation. The woman who spent the film trying to maintain an acceptable story can no longer keep the conversation entirely inside her head.
Blanchett does not ask us to excuse her. She makes it impossible not to see how terrified Jasmine is once the stories stop protecting her.
That is why the final image stays with me.
Jasmine spends the film trying to rebuild the life she lost. By the end, even the story she tells herself has stopped holding together.
For me, Blue Jasmine is among the strongest films of Allen’s later career. It is funny in places, but the humour never protects the characters from consequence.
Hawkins is superb, Cannavale and Clay bring weight to the working-class world Jasmine dismisses, and Baldwin makes Hal’s charm part of the danger.
But the film belongs to Blanchett. Jasmine can dominate a room, alienate everyone in it and then suddenly reveal the panic underneath the performance.
The money is gone. The marriage is gone. What remains is the person who had spent years believing those things were proof of who she was.
Cast and Characters
Cate Blanchett
A former New York socialite attempting to reconstruct her life after the collapse of her marriage, wealth and psychological stability.
Sally Hawkins
Jasmine’s San Francisco sister, whose modest and complicated life becomes the place Jasmine is forced to land.
Alec Baldwin
Jasmine’s wealthy former husband, whose financial crimes and infidelities eventually destroy the world surrounding them.
Bobby Cannavale
Ginger’s passionate boyfriend, repeatedly judged by Jasmine for belonging to a social world she considers beneath her.
Andrew Dice Clay
Ginger’s former husband, whose own hopes were damaged after money entrusted to Hal disappeared.
Peter Sarsgaard
A sophisticated diplomat whose interest gives Jasmine what appears to be a route back towards the social identity she has lost.
Blue Moon becomes the song Jasmine cannot stop remembering
Early jazz and blues recordings surround the film, but one Rodgers and Hart standard carries a more personal role, repeatedly reconnecting Jasmine with the story of her marriage.
Blue Moon
Conal Fowkes performs the song Jasmine associates with meeting Hal. Its romantic simplicity becomes increasingly painful as the film reveals how completely her memory of that relationship differs from what followed.
Older recordings around a life coming apart in the present
Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Jimmie Noone and Mezz Mezzrow with Sidney Bechet give the soundtrack a strong early-jazz identity.
Their performances supply movement and warmth even when Jasmine’s emotional world is becoming increasingly unstable.
Back O’Town Blues
Armstrong’s recording gives the soundtrack one of its most immediately recognisable jazz voices.
Speakeasy Blues
The recording extends the soundtrack into the early New Orleans and Chicago jazz tradition Allen has returned to throughout his career.
Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me
A lively older recording set against relationships producing rather more painful kinds of trouble.
Aunt Hagar’s Blues
W.C. Handy’s composition adds another blues voice to one of Allen’s most dramatically severe later films.
Locations
San Francisco becomes the geography of Jasmine’s present, while memories of New York preserve the wealth and social position from which she has fallen.
Ocean Beach
Ginger and Al walk along Ocean Beach, one of the film’s most recognisable California exterior locations.
Gaspare’s Pizza House
The Geary Boulevard restaurant provides the setting for Jasmine’s outing with Ginger’s children.
Post Street & Grant Avenue
Jasmine and Dwight move through the city’s more polished retail world as she begins imagining another affluent future.
Belvedere
A waterfront house in Belvedere provides the party location where Jasmine meets Dwight.
Golden Gate Bridge
The bridge appears beyond the party setting, placing Jasmine’s attempt at reinvention inside one of California’s defining landscapes.
New York
The flashbacks preserve the apartments, parties and wealthy social world that continue to define Jasmine long after she has physically left them.
Awards and Recognition
Cate Blanchett Wins
Blanchett won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Jasmine.
Sally Hawkins Nomination
Hawkins received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Original Screenplay Nomination
Woody Allen received an Academy Award nomination for the film’s original screenplay.
Cate Blanchett Wins
Blanchett also won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama.
Leading Actress Winner
Blanchett received the BAFTA Award for Leading Actress, with Hawkins and Allen also nominated in their respective categories.
One of Allen’s Most Acclaimed Later Films
Its three Academy Award nominations and Blanchett’s major awards run made Blue Jasmine one of the most recognised films of Allen’s later career.