Blue Jasmine 4

Blue Jasmine is an unusual film for a late director. I stopped watching Woody Allen films after Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters. Those films were real gems.

Blue Jasmine really does something that is rare. It actually expresses reality. Deconstructionism, as Derrida noted, is a gesture, a remark... anything or any word. It deconstructs because it is. It is an ontology in the sense that Heidegger saw it. What is funny about Blue Jasmine's situation is that she is actually at the center of her society. She has married a man who is not a very good businessman. Whereas good businessmen politic, her husband, Hal, I believe, has affairs. He is stuck in a European mode of doing business where business relationship can mean personal relationship. What strikes Blue Jasmine is... that she is at the center and yet, an absence. Her power has been dephallized by Hal's inability to understand his situation. There are no business rivalries or competitions because he is living off of himself.

Blue Jasmine's life is a life of "no control." The world of "love" can often be this way. Love turns power into a negation of being, a corruption, an extension of dynamics. She learns too late that she has to control Hal. She trusts Hal and trust is a word of love. In the field of love, power surrounds love and seeks to destroy it. Hal is her worst enemy and she does not realize it.

So the film begins with Blue Jasmine in an airplane, explaining or talking about her life to a stranger. What Blue Jasmine is seeking is to be understood. She is actually seeking an autobiographer of her life. She wants to downplay certain incidents and put little white lies here and there. Blue Jasmine, stuck with the harsh realities of life, finds herself unable to justify herself.