Coming Soon: Blue Jasmine (27/09/2013)

Woody Allen is one of those directors people love to hate. I have a friend who walked out of Vicky Cristina Barcelona half way through because she despised it so intensely. Unreservedly, I can say that it is one of my favourite films - it manages to be playful in its pretentiousness, unlike the more recent Midnight in Paris, which I thought was terrible. That might have had something to do with the fact that Owen Wilson was in it, and just seeing his face on a poster makes me want to bite my own hand.

On another note, Blue Jasmine is shaping up to be an exciting prospect. The plot is vintage Allen: he's made the long pilgrimage back to America, although this time his distressed and demented female is leaving New York to stay with her sister in San Francisco. Cate Blanchett, with her imperial cheekbones on particularly fine form, is Jasmine and by all accounts she's feeling the blues. This is a story of and for the recession (or at least, the recession as it was felt by upper middle-class New Yorkers). The situation with Jasmine's trader husband, played by Alec Baldwin, has apparently gone awry as a result of his financial fiddling and so, like many of Allen's lovers cut adrift, Jasmine looks longingly at the horizon and decides to chase it as far as she can.

This is hopefully where the comedy and the drama will combine with fizzling effect. Blue Jasmine has an excellent supporting cast, including Sally Hawkins and Peter Sarsgaard, who was oh so creepy in Boys Don't Cry. As Jasmine's posturing begins to crumble in the face of her neuroses, Allen will hopefully manage to wrangle a dark humour from this tale of class tension and family rift.