This review contains some spoilers!

I quite enjoyed Woody Allen’s latest film, Blue Jasmine. As this year’s addition to the auteur’s film canon, Jasmine poses significant questions regarding our relationship to the past, a dilemma presented with stunning complexity through the film’s narrative and the central performance of actress Cate Blanchett.

Image from Sony Pictures Classics

With the character of Jasmine, Woody Allen has taken his quintessential neurotic heroine and pushed her even further into the deep end, into the realm of the psychotic. While she may sound perfectly fine in recounting details from her early marriage to husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) and their life of luxury in New York, the cracks quickly begin to show in her quivering emotions, the mini-meltdowns, the tremulous gestures, the far-off gazes, and, used to great comedic effect, her contradictions. Why wouldn’t you fly first-class, Jasmine asks her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), even though we come to learn that our heroine has no money, been kicked out of her Brooklyn apartment, and has travelled cross-country to San Francisco to stay with the only family she has left.

The narrative is as broken as the protagonist, shuttling between past (New York) and present (San Francisco) until the past sequences eventually catch up to the beginning of the present. Jasmine’s panic attacks are often caused when the past catches up with her, or more specifically, when the present recalls the past events she would rather not share with her new acquaintances. As a result, the flashback structure is steeped in psychological meaning; not only is the character jostled between past and present, but the succession of traumas ultimately becomes too much to bear, even for a person who can commit to any story she tells herself.

The supporting players in the film inform us quickly that Jasmine’s husband has been imprisoned for running a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme, swindling numerous clients out of their supposed millions. And even though the courts have taken over whatever has been left to Jasmine, it’s clear that nobody can take away the character’s innate class and sense of style. Wearing Chanel suits and donning a Birkin bag, Jasmine appears tailor-made for this lifestyle. This seems to be her truest self: throwing dinner parties, lounging by the pool, and shopping on Madison Avenue. Jasmine supports the notion that money talks and wealth whispers; only, it whispers so softly that Jasmine remains completely ignorant of her husband’s adultery and money malfeasance. But that too is open to interpretation.

Image from Sony Pictures Classics

In the present, however, this put-together persona starts to unravel, revealing a sweaty, scatter-brained, and hysterical alter ego. The narrative juxtaposes these two performances, making the viewer wonder, how exactly did that socialite in New York become this lost child in San Francisco? During the second half, Jasmine has the chance to return to that original identity when she enters a romance with a well-off, ambitious politician (Peter Sarsgaard). As soon as she gets a whiff of his aristocratic air, she spews lies about her background, profession, and plans for the future. And while the viewer knows that these lies are somewhat half-truths (she claims she’s an interior designer even though she’s only studying to be one), Jasmine believes in her tales wholeheartedly, so quick she is able to put on a new persona.

But the past can never stay dead and buried. It is always lurking around the corner, in the strangers on the street, and especially in our memories. Jasmine may be able to keep it at bay while she drinks her Stoli martinis and pops her Xanax pills, but the past confronts her at the very moment she believes she can leave it all behind and start anew. All the fallacies she fortified herself with—the things we tell ourselves, the dreams we only keep inside—all come crashing down. And Jasmine is knocked off her pedestal once again; only this time, recovery won’t be so easy. As Jasmine herself says in the film: “there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.”

In this way, Blue Jasmine shows the underbelly of the American Dream, not only of having anything you want but also in the notion of self-invention. That American trope that tells us you can be anything you want to be in this country, even if that person is a lie. I have always been fascinated by this theme; it can be found in the best of literature (“The Great Gatsby”), cinema (Citizen Kane), and now television (Mad Men), but like Jasmine, these works show that you can never escape your past. The person underneath ultimately catches up to the persona, often tearing down the mythology it took a lifetime to create. Even if others may never come to know the truth, at the end of the day, the truth still lies in you. Buried in this film’s narrative setup is one of the major concerns of our time: can we ever move on from our past? If we can, would we choose to forget? Are we better or worse for remembering what we do?

At the beginning of the movie, we are led to believe that it was her personal bankruptcy that led Jasmine over the edge. But by the end, I think we are made to understand that the lies she tells herself are her ultimate undoing. Jasmine’s refusal to confront the past provokes her physical and psychological downfall. I would argue that the reason this story hits its mark is because of the central performance given by Cate Blanchett. The flashbacks tell only part of the story, the other half is left to Blanchett, whose far-off stares take the audience into another dimension that can never exist on the page, even if that page is written by Woody Allen.

Cate Blanchett

I have great respect for Cate Blanchett as an actress; the technique and craft are almost always on full display in her work. But never has a performance been this harrowing to experience and also this glorious to watch. We have seen many characters on the verge of a nervous breakdown before, but rarely do we get to see the actual breakdown. Either because the actors don’t have the chops or some other facet of the film makes it read as false. Blanchett is able to fly off the handle because the performance is also grounded, rooted in something that we know to be real.

Although I wish the last chapter of the movie were a bit more fleshed out, its ambiguity still left me with plenty to consider, particularly those questions: Can we ever escape the past? What would happen if we could? Just as Jasmine repeatedly explains that the song “Blue Moon” was playing when she first met Hal and that he fell in love with her because of her name, these questions have been replaying in my mind like a broken record over the last few days.

Yet, it should be pointed out that Jasmine was never her real name. It was Jeanette before she decided to change it.