A Son of the Rock

Gravier Productions. Written and Directed by Woody Allen.

So it was off to the local “Art House” cinema again. I was going to say for the first time since we went to see Brave (which I didn’t blog about because there wasn’t much to say about it – typical feel good Disney fare) but I’d forgotten about Austenland. I must have almost blanked it out.

You couldn’t mistake Blue Jasmine for anything but a Woody Allen film. It has titles in that font he’s used since nineteen hundred and a long time ago and a jazz soundtrack. It’s unusual for a Woody Allen film to be mainly set in San Francisco though.

It tells the tale of Jasmine, a New York socialite who has fallen on hard times after her husband was arrested for illegal business dealings. She is shown as self-obsessed from the outset. On the plane to San Francisco, where she is going to live with her (half-)sister, Ginger, she babbles incessantly to the poor woman in the next seat who doesn’t know her from Eve.

She looks down on both her sister and Chili, Ginger’s boyfriend, who was about to move in until Jasmine’s arrival upset their plans.

The film charts Jasmine’s attempts to navigate her new cash-strapped life and try to make something of herself – or at least find a man who can give her back her former lifestyle – interspersed with flashes back to the “good” times with her husband (Alec Baldwin) who is revealed to have been dodgy in all aspects of his life.

Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of the teetering on the edge of sanity Jasmine is a wonderful piece of acting. Sally Hawkins as Ginger (a strange choice of name for a brunette) is also convincing as a woman not terribly sure of herself or her worth. Apart from Chili (Bobby Cannavale) who seems genuinely attached to Ginger, most of the men in the film are untrustworthy in some way.

The final unravelling of the plot depends on a coincidental meeting but the information exchanged in this encounter would have emerged later in any case. This was a suitable way to dramatise it though.

There were acute observations of humanity here and as with much of Allen’s output in his latter years only a few laughs. Fine performances from the cast – especially Max Rutherford’s and Daniel Jenks’s stunned expressions as Ginger’s two sons when Jasmine unloads her woes on them while baby-sitting.

I meant to say when I mentioned the film Austenland that the classification certificate displayed on screen before its start said “Contains one example² of moderate language.”

I admit I perked up a bit at that as I immediately therefore expected all the rest of the language to be immoderate. That it wasn’t (the extent of the “moderate” language was one “Wankers!” in the whole film!) might help explain my odd sense of dissatisfaction with it.

¹This was the catch-phrase retort of the father in the sit-com Sorry! which starred Ronnie Corbett and featured an overbearing mother.

²The noun may have been instance rather than example. Whatever, it implied only one.

It’s the first ever Kirkcaldy Film Festival this weekend and as a result I was at a film premiere yesterday. (The Scottish premiere.)

The red carpet was still outside the Adam Smith Theatre this morning when we went back there for a library book sale.

I assume the carpet will be out the whole weekend. (At least the forecast is not for rain.)

The film, Austenland, wasn’t really my thing, being a romcom based on the works of Jane Austen, but the good lady enjoyed it.

The film’s colour palette was curiously pale, as if filmed through a red absorbing filter, rendering the picture almost shiny at times.

The plot has an Austen obsessed US woman, unlucky in love naturally, deciding to blow her savings on a trip to an Austen themed experience in an English Country House, final ball and all. Cue the usual misconstruings. While it was played a lot for laughs there was a sense of straining for the joke at times. I suppose it was perfectly fine if you like that sort of thing but the best bit was during the end credits where the characters, in period dress, mimed to a rap track (something to do with it being “hot in here, so let’s take off our clothes.”)