Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Sally Hawkins, Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, and Peter Sarsgaard
Distributor: Hopscotch Films
Runtime: 98 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2013

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Rating notes: Mature themes and coarse language

This is an American drama film about the disintegration of a marriage of a wealthy socialite who retreats to San Francisco to try to put her life back in order again. Cate Blanchett takes the leading role in luminous style. The source material is Tennessee Williams’ “A street Named Desire”.

Jasmine Francis (Cate Blanchett) and her philandering husband, Hal (Alec Bladwin), are a rich pair living the millionaire life of a Park-Avenue socialite couple in New York. Hal is exposed as a crooked financier and is sent to prison where he suicides. With nowhere to turn, and knowing she was responsible for turning him in, Jasmine makes the decision to move to San Francisco to be with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who is divorced from her husband, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), and in a relationship with Chili (Bobby Cannavale).

Suddenly, Jasmine is catapulted into a life that is very different to what she has led. Ginger’s apartment depresses Jasmine with its claustrophobic feel, and she tries desperately to maintain her past life style and she provokes Ginger with it. Her spirits lift when she meets wealthy Dwight Westlake (Peter Sarsgaard). He is an aspiring politician, who wants to marry her, as well as become a California Congressman, but he rejects her when he learns that she has not told him the truth about who she is.

Dwight’s own superficiality reminds us of the life Jasmine once led that she wants, but can no longer have. Cate Blanchett brings the neurotic character of Jasmine – named after her adopted parents’ favourite flower- brilliantly to life, reminding one immediately of the character of Blanche du Bois in “Streetcar Named Desire”. Bobby Cannavale (as Chili) is the reference point for Stanley.

Once looking and behaving as if good times is all she is used to, Jasmine stands deserted, pill-popping, desolate and staring anxiously at the face of poverty. Blanchett captures the pain and complexity of Jasmine in a thoroughly compelling way. Her performance in the role stays in memory long after the film has finished. She is virtually never off the screen, and Woody Allen lets her run.

The film takes Woody Allen deep into Ingmar Bergmann territory. It is a highly dramatic movie and shows people trying to survive when life is set against them. Ginger and Chili, for example, are entrenched in a working class environment, but they make efforts to cope. But there s a cruel edge to the film. At the end of the movie, Jasmine remains as far from reality as we first found her and the film becomes an exercise in personal humiliation.

Jasmine stays as a prisoner of her own delusions. She says in the film that she wants to make something of her life and “to do something substantial” with it, but we know she never will. The movie jumps from the present to the past and back again seamlessly. At the very same time as it shows Jasmine trying to rebuild her life, it shows the decline of her marriage to Hal. The present also depicts the complex relationship between Jasmine and Ginger. Through it all, Jasmine stays weak, and Allen directs all of his characters to show their flaws.

This is a film about the fall and attempted survival of a disturbed woman. Jasmine and Ginger live in very different worlds, and both need someone to belong to. They fight with each other, but each knows exactly who the other is, and both have had men who have been unfaithful to them. But it is Ginger who will survive. Allen’s direction is wonderful and he makes this movie one of the most telling that he has made in years. He moves from the extravagant escapism of “Midnight in Paris” (2011) and “To Rome With Love” (2012) to deep drama, and he gives us a richly textured movie with particularly fine acting from Blanchett and Hawkins.

The detail of affluent and working class life-styles is captured vividly by the photography in the film, which never fails to show us the cracks emerging in the characters the film is portraying. This film is a drama that carries bite, and richly deserves to be seen.