Down On Her Luck in San Francisco

'Blue Jasmine' . A film directed and written by Woody Allen. Starring Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin.


   "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers," Blanche DuBois says in Tennessee Williams's play 'A Streetcar Named Desire'.
     In Woody Allen's latest film 'Blue Jasmine', Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) hasn't come to San Francisco to depend on strangers. Instead she's fled New York City to stay with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). A widow of a now dead and ultra-rich, high level swindler named Hal (Alec Baldwin), Jasmine is now down on her luck and broke. 'Blue Jasmine' after all is a modern version of 'A Streetcar Named Desire'.
      Ginger and Jasmine  aren't genetic sisters either. They were both adopted by the same parents. Ginger lives with her two young sons in a crowded apartment.
   Both sisters try to find new lives in romance. Both are defeated in their quests. But Ginger has an old boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale) to fall back on as well as a former husband (Andrew Dice Clay) to forget. Jasmine isn't as lucky. Her husband Hal hanged himself in a prison.
    "There's only so many traumas you can withstand," a disturbed snobby Jasmine, whose real name was Jeanette, tells her two young nephews in a restaurant. Alas, this once rich wife of a multimillionaire crook can't withstand too much more pain. And we see her pain unfold in the past, told through flashbacks, and her poverty-stricken present. In the end she crashes.
    Woody Allen, who wrote the script for the film and directed it, has scored another triumph here. At the age of 78, his vision of life remains bleak and scary . But this better tale unfolds in the city of San Francisco which is still lovely to look at and that's a plus too.