Another Look at the Crisis. Blue Jasmine.
Woody Allen never ceases to surprise. In his latest film, Blue Jasmine presents a completely new approach to the economic crisis about which cinema has also spoken so much in recent years. Inside Job, Margin Call, The Company Men, El Capital, are some of the films that tell, from different points of view, always masculine, the reality of the economic world that we have to live in.
Now the protagonist is a housewife, young, beautiful and neurotic, victim of herself and of the world of money that surrounds her. Woody Allen creates flesh-and-blood characters who represent human destinies that reflect onto the spectator what, at first, is represented as alien matter. What is the role of the woman who enjoys the economic benefits of her husband without asking questions and naively justifying that she knows nothing?. This is the drama of many women who look the other way, close their eyes and deceive themselves thinking that life is like that. The “dare to think!”, has no place in the women that Cate Blanchett represents in masterly fashion, who is incapable of accepting her destiny, which she herself has contributed to creating, and who lets herself be carried away by alcohol and pills.
Woody Allen is a great connoisseur of the feminine soul and once again focuses his attention on a reality that makes us reflect on the role of the passive and self-complacent woman, before a crisis that affects everyone and everything that surrounds us. At the same time he shows us the other side of reality, that of another woman, her adoptive sister, who lives in a real world, where things are called by their name, and where limitations are assumed.
With an insuperable command of the staging, he makes clear what are the external signs that mark the difference between those two worlds of the adoptive sisters, and that only cinema, without need of the word, places the spectator in the situation and reminds us of the value that the wrapping has in our society in order to recognize oneself within a pack.
Allen again makes a masterpiece where the human being is recognized as a universal and not as an individual subject. The film acquires a life of its own and the intentions of its author pass to a second plane so that the spectator shares and feels compassion, from different points of view, for what the film shows.
Let us hope that this coming March 1 Blue Jasmine receives the recognition of Hollywood and that Cate Blanchett walks up the red carpet as a prize for her work, which, as I have already said, is simply masterly.
