Blue Jasmin

Sitting in a grungy dinner, wine spilling, mascara running, eyes bulging, Cate Blanchett shares some life wisdom with her eight-year-old nephews. “There’s only so many traumas a person can withstand,” she slurs, “before one takes to the streets and start screaming.”

It’s merely one stunning moment of both tragedy and comedy in Woody Allen’s beautiful, biting homage to A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanchett plays Jasmine, our modern day Blanche du Bois. When her wealthy, swindler husband (Alec Baldwin)loses everything, she moves to San Francisco to live with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who she’s been separated from by time, distance, class and understanding for many years.
The two sisters try to discern what happiness and settling means to them. Blanchett’s performance is mesmerising, imbuing the potentially insufferable Jasmine with a desperate pathos. Hysterical, selfabsorbed and falling apart at the seams, there’s an inescapable vulnerability to her; one that even Allen can’t help but feel. In one powerful scene, Jasmine hyperventilates as she discovers her husband’s affair with a teenage au pair. Her humiliation and fear for her future is clear - as is the parallel to Allen’s own adultery.
As ever, Allen’s cityscapes are sumptuous: the sweaty, artfully dishevelled San Francisco emphasising how out of place the gilded Jasmine feels, and how affected she is compared to the blunt authenticity of Ginger’s working class lovers (Bobby Cannavale, Louis CK and the magnificent Andrew Dice Clay.)
Still, despite the often hilarious dialogue, there’s a heartbreaking elliptical feel to the piece, as Jasmine and Allen wonder how you can start over somewhere new, when you can never leave yourself behind?