Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen in a New York State of Mind

Last week I finally went to see Woody Allen's new film, Blue Jasmine, starring the wonderful Cate Blanchett, at the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton.
This will not be a long review, nor a scholar article. I just want to share with you what caught me more in this exquisite picture.

First of all, something concerning the director's path as an auteur in my personal experience. I grew up watching Woody Allen's films with my dad, I watched Annie Hall (my absolute favourite), Manhattan, Zelig, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Matchpoint, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Suddenly I watched his new films without finding without finding that old New Yorker. And I know things change, and I also think it is very important for an artist of his level to be able to take risks. But, let's be honest. His last releases cannot possibly be compared to his old masterpieces, if not for the stable theme of couples forming and dismantling.
From the minute the film started, I had no more doubts, he is back with a suitcase full of his artistic life's experience, ready to move forward without forgetting the past.
The dicotomy past/future, expressed through the editing in Jasmine's flashbacks, is a constant in the film. But how does it involve the director even more than the character itself?
Woody Allen has set his films in the most different cities, but New York New York, and the Manhattan lifestyle, have always been a personal and artistic leitmotiv throughout his career.
Thinking about him as a character in his films, I have always noticed that the ones in which he looks like he is acting as himself, not as a character, are always the films having New York as a setting.
Annie Hall is a great example in terms of study of one's own life through the critical and objective eye of the camera. His story with Diane Keaton did not work out well? And there they are, together, telling us about the story of an unsuccessful, but great, lovestory. 
New York is the setting of Jasmine's flashbacks, of the high society parties in Manhattan, the patinate and glamorous life, and the fashion.
This last thing is what Jasmine materially brings with her when she moves to her sister in San Francisco: the Hermés bag is the physical hemblem of her link to the past.

My point is that Woody Allen, the director, and Woody Allen, the New Yorker, met again to cross the past boundaries together and, as the protagonist, try to accept the future. 
The differences between the cities are also emblematic: New York and San Francisco are geographically opposed, East and West Coast, the difference of accent, of lifestyle, etc.
The memory of New York will always stay, but Jasmine has to let it go. The rest of the world is out there, and the City of Allen's childhood, and his work of the 70s has changed now, and so have we.
This is only my personal opinion, of course, but I took this as personal life-lesson, and one of the greatest.
Shall we now talk about Cate Blanchett? Not only her appearance and elegance make her stand out from the crowd, creating again a contrast between lifestyles: she shines next to the people in San Francisco, and when she suddenly finds the man who remembers her about the past (elegant, glamorous, rich), it doesn't work. She was not meant to go back to that kind of life, to be stuck in the perfect coverstory marriage. Jasmine has to fix a more important thing first: herself.
This is A Film.
The script: brilliant, humorous, modern, Allen. 
The cast: Oscar performance by Cate Blanchett, great interpretation by the co-actors Alec Baldwin, Bobby Cannavale, Sally Hawkins and Louis C.K.
The directing: smooth, psychoanalytical, mixing the style of comedies and melodramas.

This, in fact, reminds me of similarities between Blue Jasmine and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodovar, 1988). The narrative construction around the film female characters, the attitude Al has towards women, all kinds of women, exactly like Ivan in Pepa's dream-sequence. 
My last point, since I am not writing a long essay, concerns what I was mentioning about screenwriting in my previous post: http://artbookscinema.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/screenwriters-on-screenwriting-tony.html
Tony Gilroy said that to do this job one has to know human behaviour, have empathy.
Woody Allen, his anxietes, his fears impersonated by himself or projected on the characters, his deep study of psychoanalysis and philosophy just gave me one thought.
No wonder he has become one of the most established directors of the 20th Century, they say you either have it or you don't, and he definitely has it and even more. 
In conclusion, dear Mr. Allen, I will be waiting for the next great picture. Thank you. 

The story behind the song - Chelsea Hotel by Leonard Cohen

I started thinking about this new idea for the blog when I was listening to Leonard Cohen's 1985 live when he dedicates Chelsea Hotel to Janis Joplin. In that moment I thought that some songs in particular have entire personal stories behind them, so I will try to discover them, analyze the songs' lyrics and, when relevant, music videos.

Leonard Cohen wrote Chelsea Hotel no. 1 in 1972 and then replaced with Chelsea Hotel no. 2. I will now publish both songs' lyrics to see their differences, and the one thing they have in common, a splendid elegy by a songwriting's master to another, in memory of the great woman, and lover, Janis Joplin was. Nonetheless, with the glorious New York Chelsea Hotel as setting.

Chelsea Hotel #1  

                                                                                   
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel  

You were talking so brave and so free
Giving me head on the unmade

bed
While the limousines wait in the street
And those were the reasons and that was New York
I was running for the money and the flesh
That was called love for the workers in song
It still is for those of us left.
But you got away, didn't you, baby?
You just threw it all to the crowd
You got away, they can't pay you now
For making your sweet little song
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
In the winter of 67
My friends of that year they were all trying to go queer
And me I was just getting even
And those were the reasons and that was New York
I was running for the money and the flesh
That was called love for the workers in song
It still is for those of us left
But you got away, didn't you, baby?
You just threw it all to the crowd
You got away, they can't pay you now
For making your sweet little song

 Chelsea Hotel #2

I remember you
well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
Those were the reasons and that was New York,
we were running for the money and the flesh.
And that was called love for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left.
Ah but you got away, didn't you babe,
you just turned your back on the crowd,
you got away, I never once heard you say,
I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you
and all of that jiving around.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind,
we are ugly but we have the music."

And then you got away, didn't you babe...

I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can't keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
that's all, I don't even think of you that often.  

As we can notice, the first version is a proper elegy focused on the singer's death, whereas the second one is more universal and focused on the world of music, on the pros and cons of success, and on the lust that accompanied them inside room 424.
Before performing the song, Leonard Cohen explained how they met in the hotel's elevator... In his words:

"Every concert that I give, I dedicate this song to a great American singer that I met one night in an elevator in a shabby hotel in New York City. It was a fine elevator, we found ourselves there often. I don't know what she was doing there, I think she was looking for Kris Kristofferson, I told her that I was Kris Kristofferson, but she said: "I thought he was bigger." I said I used to be bigger, but I've been sick. And we spent a little time together, and I love the way that she sang, and she died, and sometime later I think I was sitting at a bar in a Polynesian restaurant in Miami Beach, I don't know what I was doing that either. I have no programme, no five-year-plan. I just move from hotel to hotel, and from bar to bar, and by the grace of the one above, the song comes. And I remember sitting at this particularly abnotious Polynesian restaurant where they served a kind of coconut drink that was particularly little and sinister, which contained no alcohol, but a certain chemical that demoralized you entirely. And I remember writing on one of their very badly designed napkins  "I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel..."

Link to the 1985 live version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVq9K3lGtN4

Lana del Rey recently covered the song and gave it an amazing hommage through her terrific performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj_myXdOLV0