Woody Allen's latest film is partly set in San Francisco. I've been an enthusiastic Allen admirer since Annie Hall, and I'd been anticipating for months the prospect of seeing what he would do with this city's beautiful scenery and quirky inhabitants.
Adding to my anticipation was the fact that Blue Jasmine is an updated retelling of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, in my opinion one of the 20th century's greatest plays and films. To top it all off, Allen's film stars Cate Blanchett, who will at a minimum receive a much-deserved Academy Award nomination for Blue Jasmine. She may even win the damned thing (though I wouldn't want to go up against Meryl Streep in the upcoming August: Osage County).
Blanchett as Jasmine plays a modern-day Blanche DuBois, a fallen woman (in the financial sense) forced out of her One Percent Manhattan life. With nowhere to go, Jasmine must move in with her lower-class sister in San Francisco's still-sketchy-in-places Mission neighborhood.
The storyline follows Jasmine as she attempts to rebuild her life. Psychologically, however, she's not up to the task. And the Jacqueline Susannesque quantities of Xanax and vodka she swallows aren't helping, either. Though Jasmine is pretentious and self-destructive, I came to care deeply for her. She is one of my favorite Allen heroines to date, and I rooted for her all the way.
Spoiler Alert! Don't Read The Following If You Haven't Seen the Movie
As Jasmine's situation becomes more claustrophobic, with doors and windows closing on her in every direction, I began to fear the worst outcome for her: death. I was wrong. It was worse than that.
Toward the very end, it's clear Jasmine can no longer remain in her sister's apartment, her last refuge. And so, in the final scene, we follow Jasmine as she leaves the apartment, wanders the streets, and eventually plants herself on a park bench. Her hair is stringy and wet, she wears no makeup, though she is wearing one of her last pieces of nice clothing, a Chanel suit jacket. Jasmine is talking to herself in such an unnerving way that a woman seated on the bench gets up and leaves. Cut to black. The end.
That's when the purpose of Blue Jasmine became all too clear. It's a case study of how someone becomes 'a crazy homeless person.' No one has Jasmine's back. She's completely alone, without means, and unable to care for herself. Allen's film suggests to me that any of us could end up like her, whether it's due to a loss of: money, physical health, mental health, family and friends, or youth. And this is why the movie's ending haunts me. The scene doesn't tap into the audience's fear of death, as many of Allen's movies do. It taps into our fear of a living death.
Allen offers some hope, however. Jasmine's downfall was, I think, largely because she wasn't fully present in her own life. She looked the other way at the inconvenient and unpleasant truths happening right in front of her. It's as if Allen is saying that if we're to avoid our own 'living death,' attention must be paid to what's going on both within and around us. Once we do, we have to take the appropriate actions—before it's too late.
