What to make of Allen’s curious tale of his protagonist’s demise? What to make of the unsympathetic husband who runs off with the teenage au-pair? It’s hard to get a handle on an Allen film these days, especially one which purports to adopt a female perspective. Blanchett’s Jasmine is a wreck of a woman, and on one level, it’s to the film’s credit that it portrays her warts and all, as she unravels, stitches herself back together and then unravels oncemeore. She is the trope of the neurotic, dippy but beautiful woman whose refusal to see what it going on around her will be her downfall, a downfall she in so many ways deserves. Nevertheless, to Blanchett’s credit, we can’t help rooting for her, even if just a bit. We want things to work out for her in the end, and when they don’t, it smarts. This is indeed, a three dimensional character, and there is a certain courage to be found in the construction and her depiction. Great characters can be a pain in the neck.
The other less Flaubertian way of reading the film is as a critique of the excesses of Wall Street, although social commentary always rings somewhat hollow in Allen’s world. He is a director whose insularity lead to him treating the world as essentially a vehicle for his movies to be set in, an attitude as solipsistic and neo-imperialistic as that of his successor, Wes Anderson, who inherited Allen’s love of guest stars and ‘exotic’ locations. However, Allen at his best also riffs off of the loss of his European soul, the paradox of having cinematic power but lacking the cinematic profundity to match up to his idols. Allen’s very fecundity, his capacity to stitch together an off-the-cuff story with a few gags, which would always be financed, year after year, seemed to be something which, at the peak of his power he railed against. The creation of an anti-heroine, in the shape of Jasmine, is the fruit of the labours of this other Allen, a filmmaker who occasionally lived up to his own aspirations.
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