Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine”

Feb 09, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When I read that Woody Allen’s latest and highly popular movie, “Blue Jasmine,” is themed on Tennessee Williams’ fantastic work, “A Street Car Named Desire,” I had to see it. Williams is one of the greatest playwrights of all time. I suspect I love his work because he wrote on tragic family motifs that were present in my own family while I was growing up in Wortmanville.
My favourite is a “Street Car Named Desire,” followed by the “Glass Menagerie” and “Orpheus Descending” in that order. Allen on the other had has not been a writer that I greatly admired. Allen’s body of work is contextualized in American culture. He writes for an American audience and if you are not American, certain subtleties and many nuances appear invisible.
On the other hand, Roman Polanski writes in a universal context. He philosophizes on people and their innate failures. There is nothing particularly French about “Bitter Moon,” and British about “The Ghost Writer,” my two favourite Polanski films (please see “Bitter Moon,” great movie on the human condition with an irresistible love song, “Slave to Love,” sung at a concert for the 80th birthday of Mikhail Gorbachev by the original singer, Brian Ferry, at the Royal Albert Hall; check out Ferry’s on-stage, backup singers and dancers – extraordinarily beautiful).
Allen and Polanski have very interesting pasts. Allen is alleged to have seduced his adopted daughter and Polanski is wanted on criminal charges in the US for forcefully sodomizing an underage girl in the home of the brilliant actor, Jack Nicholson. Life is amazingly ironic. At the moment at the Old Bailey in London, two former BBC journalists are on trial for forced sex committed on girls in the sixties, that is about fifty years ago, while in Paris, Polanski lives a celebrated life.
Back to “Blue Jasmine.” It cannot miss the eye of the viewer that Allen did pattern his latest work on Williams’s “A Street Car named Desire.” The difference, of course, is the stars. “A Street Car named Desire” featured two artists whose acts are almost impossible to emulate – Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh.
There is a line in “Blue Jasmine,” that was not in “A Street Car Named Desire,” and this is what makes the overall message of the film so important. The little boy said to his tycoon father, “Dad, the kids at school say that you are rich and give plenty to charity.” The father replied, “Son, when you earn so much wealth, you must give back some to the society, to those less fortunate.”
Both “A Street Car Named Desire,” and “Blue Jasmine,” are powerful stories of the evil the overzealous love of money can do to a human. The timing of the popularity of Allen’s film couldn’t be better. In the US at the moment, President Obama and his Democratic Party are locked in a nasty protracted battle with the Republican Party over the role of government in helping the less fortunate
The US budget has removed unemployment benefits from over a million and a half citizens in dire need of it. As folks flock to the cinemas in the US to see Allen’s film, they will get a vivid account of what money does to the rich. It simply destroys the human capacity to be modest, humane, and caring.
I have always believed that the inner failing of the wealthy person is that he/she judges every other human by the amount of wealth they have.
You can be the best cricketer, footballer, poet, or singer. If you hobnob with the super-wealthy, they will never judge you and see you for the innate qualities you are endowed with. They will judge you through their values which have as the centrepiece, the amount of money one possesses. Rich people only understand one language, have one value, interact with only one process – the possession of wealth.
Once you become rich, your tycoon neighbour who snubbed you will ask you to dine with his family. He wants your company now because you have what he has and such people should get to know each other and socialize with each other. You can’t help feeling sorry for those who want to keep up with the Joneses. The Joneses will never completely embrace them because they don’t have what the Joneses have.
The famous playboy Pakistani cricketer, Imran Khan, made an interesting observation. The rich folks loved him. Then when he retired and started to build a cancer hospital, his pleas for donations ended in failure. His rich friends didn’t want his company anymore. Khan wasn’t in their class category. See “A Street Car Named Desire.” and “Blue Jasmine,” and listen to “Slave to Love.”

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