Women on the verge
Updated: 2013-10-18 08:38
By Elizabeth Kerr(HK Edition)
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A pair of complex women are in the spotlight on Hong Kong screens this week?-?for worse and for worse. Elizabeth Kerr reports.
It would appear that the ladies are descending on Hong Kong cinemas this week. Fall means awards season and with it come the so-called "real" films with "real" stories for us all to chew on. Fall can be a better season for girls too, as women are generally relegated to window dressing and telling the superhero that she loves him even if he's just destroyed a large city (I'm looking at youMan of Steel). This is the time to revel in nuanced, recognizable womenwhorise above trite stereotypes and outdated expectations. The month started well with Sandra Bullock's gender transcendent astronaut inGravityand continues with two more characters that should make the sisterhood glow. Well, there are two more weeks in October.
Ostensibly a study of self-involvement, depression and willful delusion,Blue Jasmine - Woody Allen's latest - is as much about the title character's psychological unraveling as it is about Allen's own arrogance. It's one of Allen's best films in quite a while, and the return to his home turf serves him well. That's by no means a sweeping indictment of filmmakers who work outside their geographic element. Many can and do just fine. Allen isn't among them. Now that he's gotten the twee fox hunts and Tate Gallery events of London, the quaint cafs of Barcelona and piazza-mania of Rome out of his system, he can concentrate on what he does best.
Conversely, writer Stephen Jeffreys and director Oliver Hirschbiegel are working with a "character"whois trying her best not to unravel,despite circumstances that would vindicate a total breakdown.Dianais inherently dramatic, the kind a screenwriter smacks their lips at,but Jeffreys and Hirschbiegel, who managed a complex portrait of Hitler's last days inDownfall, avoid any hint of a challenge or significant reflection on the galvanizing impact of Diana's death. It was, after all, a "Where were you when you heard?" moment.
Affluent, hedge fund wife Jasmine (Cate Blanchett, unofficially launching this year's Oscar race) tucks her tail between her legs and heads off to her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), in San Francisco after her entire life goes belly up. Her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) turned out to be a Bernie Madoff-type crook and was repeatedly unfaithful. Broke and humiliated by having to sell shoes to the same women she lunched with when things were good, Jasmine leaves it all behind - after being picked up talking to herself on the street. Similarly, the trappings of wealth and power surround Diana,the People's Princess(Naomi Watts, in a career-ending role if she didn't already have considerable body of work to support her continued employment).The advantages that had once brought happinessbegin to wear on her in the last year of her life, which are the focus ofDiana. Sixteen years after her death in a car wreck, Diana still sells newspapers and books and gets television ratings. Hirschbiegel tracks her last two years and the innocent (insipid in this film) romance between the princess and a Pakistani surgeon, Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews,Lost). It feels just like a moderately entertaining romantic dramedy. Then - spoiler alert - she dies.
Blanchett's and Watts' performances come from opposite ends of the spectrum. Watts is all mimicry and bland tabloid headline duplication (very often with the aid of a horrific wig), which dovetails perfectly withDiana's general lack of backbone. There is absolutely nothing to learn here, no revelations, no fresh perspectives. It would be easy to callDianaout for lacking the courage of its convictions - if it had any. The one thing the film does manage is to re-imagine the princess as something of a brat. She pursues Khan and then has what amounts to a hissy fit when he doesn't bend his life to hers. Much of this part of the story is conjecture, so it's anyone's guess as to what really went down, but this version depicts a petulant child in need of a spanking. The execrable dialogue doesn't help.
Blanchett does that Great Acting thing, but contrary to the buzz it feels more like a histrionic drama school exercise than a thoughtful inside out performance. Jasmine is all grand gestures and runny mascara; something ripped from a Douglas Sirk melodrama. It doesn't help that Jasmine is, despite being built as a character to explore these particular neuroses, a reprehensible person. The clunky flashbacks that Allen uses to depict Jasmine's downfall feature a woman so oblivious to her own arrogance and so wrapped up in smug, white-collar activism ("We donate to the museum.") there's little to latch onto and empathize with. Yes, that is the point. But it's also intensely distancing. That Allen thinks 2013's financial climate is the time to create a character that got stinking rich off the backs of the 1 percent is baffling.
Shapeless as the central characters in eitherBlue JasmineorDianaare, they are the most fully formed in their respective moves. Allen insists in injecting a touch of New York into everything he does, and so this time we get a gaggle of blue-collar Brooklyn/Jersey archetypes (that are somehow native to the Bay Area) to remind Jasmine of how "menial" her life has become. Ginger's ex-husband, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), is still bitter about Hal ripping him off, and her current grease-monkey boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) is as trashy as Ginger is. These are people that - horrors! - drink beer. Jasmine appears to be on the road back to the life with which she has become accustomed when she meets well-educated, connected Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), but a chance meeting with Augie destroys that. Like all women in a Woody Allen movie, Jasmine is punished somehow, as is Ginger, whose happiness allegedly comes with an abusive man subject to temper tantrums. But if they interact with cardboard cutouts, then Diana, and Watts, gets to play with whatever comes a step beneath that. Andrews is naturally charismatic and a good actor, but here he is allowed to display all the charm of a sleeping gerbil. And, again, the film is so neutered no one else leaves an impression. These should be interesting women. They're not. At leastGravityis still showing.
Blue JasmineandDianaopened in Hong Kong on Thursday.
(HK Edition 10/18/2013 page7)