Blue Jasmine

I loved this film, particularly the acting and especially Cate Blanchett’s extraordinary performance. But then, I love Woody Allen. I go to see his films for much the same reason I used to see Jean-Luc Godard’s—even the bad ones give me food for thought. Here, I had a bountiful feast.

Blanchett’s performance is remarkable throughout, but it is the final scene that has stayed with me. I can still see Jasmine sitting alone on that park bench, her surroundings as forlorn as the devastation on her face. The moment is riveting precisely because so little is expressed overtly. Hopelessness registers in her empty gaze, in her isolation, and in the terrible stillness of a woman whose carefully constructed identity has finally collapsed.

I was reminded of Emily Watson’s luminous performance in Breaking the Waves, in which her face seems capable of expressing the range and intensity of emotion we associate with the great performances of the silent era. Blanchett achieves something similar here. Her soul seems laid bare as the life she has constructed from something other than reality finally falls apart. The crumbling of her story becomes visible in her face. Jasmine has spent so long creating herself that, when the story collapses, there appears to be no self left for her to return to.

That is what makes the final scene so haunting. It leaves us not only shaken by Jasmine’s fate but questioning the stories we believe about our own lives. Jasmine may be an extreme case, but the mechanism is familiar. Much of what we think of as ourselves is not necessarily a direct experience of reality but a continuous mental narrative composed of roles, desires, hopes, fears, memories, expectations, and the perceptions of others. Jasmine’s tragedy is that she has mistaken that narrative for reality.

Her personal experience therefore becomes universal.

Blue Jasmine has frequently been compared to A Streetcar Named Desire, understandably, because of the parallels between Jasmine and Blanche DuBois. But I found myself thinking instead of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, in which Alma and Elisabet struggle with identity, performance, and the stories through which the self is constructed. In all of these works, the boundary between who a person is and who she believes herself to be becomes increasingly unstable.

This idea also recalls Byron Katie’s Loving What Is, in which she argues that much of human suffering comes from believing thoughts that conflict with reality. Whatever one makes of that philosophy, it provides an intriguing lens through which to view Jasmine. She does not merely lie to other people; she has built an identity that requires her to continually reinterpret reality in order to preserve it. When reality finally becomes impossible to evade, she has nowhere left to hide.

In this respect, Jasmine also reminds me of Kirsten Dunst’s character in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Both women inhabit psychological worlds that profoundly shape their relationship to external reality, although the films take them in very different directions.

Many people I have spoken with find the final scene of Blue Jasmine unbearably hopeless and sad. Perhaps that illustrates, once again, how much of ourselves we bring with us to the movies. I see something else in it as well. Jasmine is not so different from us; she is different largely in degree. The scene asks us to recognize something of ourselves in her—to examine the stories through which we construct our own identities before, like Jasmine, we become incapable of distinguishing those stories from the lives we are actually living.

And it is Blanchett who makes that recognition possible. By the final shot, she no longer needs to explain Jasmine to us. Everything we need to know is there in her face.