Watching Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine on DVD, I am once again, and surprisingly so, drawn to San Francisco. An unlikely tourism vehicle, the film focuses on a selfish and largely unlikeable society woman played by Cate Blanchett who married up and desperately needs to do so again to save herself after her husband, played by Alec Baldwin, experiences a Bernie Madoff-like disgrace.
Flashbacks depict her husband’s snaking around and his wife’s increasing arrogance. Their life in New York is all big apartments, tables at charitable balls, the right reservations, and a house in the Hamptons. Don’t too many of us know couples like this?
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Once exhausted from her life of yoga and Pilates classes, Jasmine ends up selling shoes to her former colleagues, goes a little crazy, and heads west to crash at her sister’s and remake her life. Her comedown is complete; she ends up as a receptionist at a dentist’s office and can’t quite adapt to her sibling’s blue-collar circumstances or her own. Jasmine has a little prescription-drug habit to accompany her alcohol intake. For someone who probably never ventured east of Park Avenue, her elitism no longer meshes with her circumstances. She’s now a worker in a working-class world, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart in a Californian House of Mirth.
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Yet I am amused by Jasmine’s pretension. Although this is a downer of a Woody Allen film, I end up wanting to visit San Francisco again anyway. I am reminded of its vibrance and diversity, its highs and lows. Being on the skids here could indeed be preferable to a comedown in Manhattan. Cate Blanchett’s character should be singing “save me, San Francisco,” but whether she’s worth salvation a viewer should decide.
—Lori Tripoli