Woody Allen Without Woody Allen, II
Blue Jasmine & Coup de Chance  

1,335 words

I can just imagine Woody Allen’s elevator pitch for Blue Jasmine: “Imagine Streetcar Named Desire, only Blanche du Bois was married to Bernie Madoff.” Yes, Blue Jasmine (2013) is derivative. Yes, it is derivative of a classic, to which it will inevitably be compared and found wanting. But for all that, it is an excellent film and belongs among Woody Allen’s best.

I watched Blue Jasmine because the lead role of Jasmine Francis is played by one of my favorite actresses, Cate Blanchett. Jasmine is moving from New York to San Francisco to restart her life after her divorce from Hal (Alec Baldwin), a Bernie Madoff-like swindler who supported her in high style. Now penniless, Jasmine is staying with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who is a divorced mother of two who works as a supermarket checker.

At first we are rooting for Jasmine, who seems like a victim of misfortune. Yes, she’s a bit high maintenance, even a bit of a snob. Downward mobility has been hard on her. But Americans love stories of people who are down on their luck picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and overcoming obstacles.

Jasmine must also deal with some family drama. Both Ginger and Jasmine were adopted, so they are not biological sisters. Thus there is a bit of estrangement, and this movie puts stock in genes. Jasmine was a good girl who married up. Ginger was a bit wild and married down. Ginger has not one but two Stanley Kowalskis in her life: her ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay) and her boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale), both of whom are urban ethnic stereotypes.

But this is the stuff of comedy, and we look forward to Jasmine overcoming what are, in truth, quite minor flaws and starting over.

Jasmine gets a job as a receptionist for a creepy Jewish dentist, Dr. Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg), whom she has to fight off. Jasmine has expensive but good tastes, so she wants to become an interior decorator. But instead of just trying her hand at it, she decides to sign up for an online course. But before she does that, she decides to sign up for an evening class on how to use a computer. It all seems rather hare-brained, more like procrastination than an actual plan. Clearly, our heroine has self-confidence issues. But, we remind ourselves, this is a comedy.

As the story unfolds, however, Jasmine seems increasingly phoney. Flashbacks to her marriage show her as less of an innocent victim than she presents herself to be. She’s also barely holding herself together: she drinks heavily and pops Xanax all the time. Later, we learn she had a nervous breakdown, which is a nice way of talking about a psychotic episode.

At a party, Jasmine meets Dwight Westlake (Peter Sarsgaard), a wealthy and highly eligible widower who is smitten with her. When Dwight offers her a wonderful life, she has a choice: level with him about her husband or lie. Only by being honest will she make a long-term relationship possible. But she lies from the start, and the lies keep compounding, like debt. Still, as things get more serious, we hope that Jasmine will fess up sooner rather than later, smooth things out, and manage to live happily ever after. But she misses every opportunity, and when the truth comes out, everything falls apart.

Jasmine’s pretenses lead her to disdain both Augie and Chili. Both of them are boors, but then again she married a thief and a philanderer. When Jasmine infects Ginger with her attitudes, she almost wrecks her relationship with Chili by taking up with another guy, who turns out to be married.

Blue Jasmine is a comedy, but there’s sadness in good comedies too. In this case, the ending is very bleak. Jasmine is slowly revealed to be a consummate narcissist, and every bit the ruthless manipulator that Hal was. (There are plenty of clues along the way, but we choose to overlook them.)

Narcissists put the construction and maintenance of a false self-image above everything. In Jasmine’s case, her false persona is innocence. This false self-image exists, of course, only in the minds of others. Thus narcissists harm others because they must constantly lie to and manipulate their audience to maintain the charade. Their lives are tragic, because they are presented constantly with choices: maintain the lie or live in the real world. Jasmine chooses the lie, loses her chance at happiness, then basically ends up a crazy woman talking to herself on a park bench.

Jasmine is one of Cate Blanchett’s best performances, right up there with Tár, winning her the best actress Academy Award in 2014. Sally Hawkins is also excellent as Ginger. Blue Jasmine is snappily written, tightly edited, and runs just a bit over 90 minutes. Not only does Woody Allen not appear in the film, there are no Woody Allenesque stand-in characters either. As for the “philosophy” of Blue Jasmine, it is not the least bit nihilistic or subversive. Jasmine is brought down only by her own bad character and choices. Here Allen is solidly on the side of reality and honesty.

Coup de Chance (Stroke of Luck, 2023) is Allen’s most recent movie, his 50th film. He filmed it in Paris, with a French cast, in French. Coup de Chance is not a comedy. It is more of a thriller.

The Fourniers, Fanny (Lou de Laâge) and Jean (Melvil Poupaud), are a wealthy and so far childless couple living in Paris. Fanny is younger than Jean and is something of a trophy wife. She works at an exclusive auction house, whereas he is in business, making rich people richer. Jean is more bourgeois, Fanny more bohemian. But everything seems idyllic until Fanny bumps into an old school friend, Alain (Niels Schneider) who is a writer living the bohemian life. He’s literally writing a novel in a Paris garret. Fanny and Alain are drawn into an affair. Thus far, Allen seems to be setting us up for the same sort of bourgeois vs. bohemian dynamics as Midnight in Paris and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (which I review here).

Jean begins to suspect something, so he hires a private detective, who quickly learns the truth. Then, in a quite shocking turn, Jean cooly hires two thugs to kill Alain. It quickly becomes apparent that Jean has done this before. When Alain disappears, Fanny thinks he has abandoned her. But Fanny’s mother, Camille (Valérie Lemercier), to whom she has confessed the affair, likes crime novels. She suspects something darker and begins to investigate.

When Jean discovers that Camille has tricked his private investigator into revealing that he had Fanny investigated, he phones his friends, the killers. They are going to the countryside that weekend, and he wants Camille’s death to look like a hunting accident.

Given her suspicions, of course, Camille shouldn’t want to go anywhere near the woods with Jean and a gun. But not only does she go along with him, she contrives to send Fanny back to Paris, so the two of them are alone. I was thinking that Allen was setting us up for a third-act plot twist that could have made Coup de Chance into a classic. But no, everything in this movie comes down to a stroke of luck. Given the title, we can’t say we weren’t warned. But it still feels like a letdown.

Although far from bad, Coup de Chance is not one of Allen’s best movies. First of all, there aren’t any admirable characters. Jean is a monster, but he isn’t a particularly memorable one. Fanny is an idiot. Alain isn’t all that interesting. Camille is not particularly well-drawn either, and her story arc from bumbling amateur detective to something more turns out to be an illusion. Second, the plot depends too much on luck. In spite of this, though, there is a moral order to the universe of Coup de Chance. In truth, the only thing subverted in this movie is Allen’s reputation as a storyteller.