Café Society (2016)

Light and mournful, like the omnipresent jazz piano glued under most scenes, Woody Allen’s latest film revisits many of his favourite concerns: the trappings of class, the neurosis of society, the impossibility of love and the gentle meaninglessness of it all. It doesn’t pang as sharp as Annie Hall nor bite as hard as Blue Jasmine but Café Society is charming from beginning to end.

Jesse Eisenberg excels as the Woody Allen archetype Bobby, a nervy fast-talking New Yorker who moves to Hollywood and takes a job running errands for his powerful-agent uncle, Phil (Steve Carell). As much of his work demonstrates, Eisenberg is most comfortable when acting uncomfortable and he brings Allen’s frantic, self-obsessed chatter to life perfectly here. Cooler and self-assured, Kristen Stewart’s Vonnie falls in line with the kooky-aloof love interests of Allen’s oeuvre. Both Bobby and his Uncle Phil are smitten with Vonnie and the drama unfolds from there in a familiarly satisfying-yet-unsatisfying way.

Shot by Vittorio Storaro, the film has a depth of colour and light that really stands out. Most films with this little shadow seem overlit and washed out whereas this has a genuine richness. The sunlight pours gold through windows, the Hollywood exteriors are an even sepia, the night time pool parties have a pretty warm/cool contrast and the New York café scene has the worn coldness of old folk album covers. It’s great to look at and is one of many ingredients that make the film such an easy watch.

Punctuated by the typically tired philosophy and shrugging wit (“live each day as if it’s your last; one day it will be”) of Woody Allen’s late work, Café Society sits neatly in the canon. It is no masterpiece but it is well put together with solid performances and, at 96 minutes, never threatens to outstay its welcome.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

The Woody Allen archetype is one of the most lucid cinematic creations of the last 50 years. It is the big screen extension of Allen’s early stand-up career, the neurotic ramblings of which crossed over successfully onto his filmic characters, drawing knowing laughs from the nervous-wreck component in the psyche of everyone who saw them. Often – especially in his early films – Allen would play these characters himself but, even when deciding to remain behind the camera, fast-talking anxiety-ridden anti-heroes still pepper his work.

Plenty of darkness follows these characters through their tribulations and Allen has always laced shades of tragedy through the scripts he writes – his most celebrated style is a kind of gloomy light-heartedness – but nothing of his I’ve seen explores the back story and motivations of his muse with as much mastery and depth as Blue Jasmine.

The film essentially grabs the psychological turmoil of his lead, Jasmine Francis, from the incidental and thrusts it right into the spotlight before examining it at close quarters. Cate Blanchett is compelling as the eponymous character who is forced into taking refuge in the home of her adopted sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), when her life as a New York socialite married to an obscenely wealthy financier (Alec Baldwin) crumbles as a result of her husband’s downfall and disgrace. There is comedy of course, but this rather seeps through the tragedy rather than vice versa.

Jasmine is at once a terrifying and immensely sympathetic character, eliciting grimaces from the audience the deeper she digs her holes. On the surface, she has an honest effort at rebuilding her life, working thanklessly as a dentist’s receptionist to support her computer classes which she takes with a view to becoming an interior designer. Nevertheless her neuroses won’t yield and, simply unable to adjust to a life lower down in the socio-economic scale, she aids her own mind’s disintegration with a dependency on Xanax and alcohol which deepens the more face she tries to save. (The exact nuances of a person lonely and depressed and how consummately Allen and Blanchett observe them deserve to be written about at length and in depth and hopefully have been/will be elsewhere.)

In the score, the familiar lounge jazz of many Woody Allen films dovetails between scenes in a way anempathetic to Jasmine’s plight but sometimes coming across as a sigh at the inevitability of her decline.

I see three tones balanced impeccably throughout the film, the first is the drama/tragedy that impels the narrative, second is comedy and third is horror. In a way, Blue Jasmine really is a horror film and the laughs are served up and indulged in as a reaction to the terror of losing one’s mind, catching in the throat as soon as they rise. My favourite scene demonstrates this powerfully. Jasmine sits in a café babysitting her two nephews and begins (as she often does) drunkenly drifting into a monologue as if the boys were not present. They sit open-mouthed as she waxes on about the song ‘Blue Moon’ and her life’s ambitions. Suddenly she is present and advises the boys to be generous when they become wealthy. When they respond “mom said you used to be OK but then you got crazy”, the look on her face is more terrifying than her wide-eyed Galadriel close-up in The Fellowship of the Ring with none of that moment’s surprise factor needed. As she finishes “there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming” the audience’s reaction is a confused mixture of laughter, tears and recoil. That response adequately sums up the film.