So. Cate Blanchett won. Everyone knew this from the start. A Woody Allen scandal in the middle only cemented her chances. But I am disappointed.

Yes, Blanchett is a woman of porcelain beauty and terrifying skill. Who else could pull off playing Elizabeth I and Katherine Hepburn and Lady Galadriel all in one lifetime. But while her character in Blue Jasmine sets your teeth on edge, you want to shake her by the shoulders and say, “Oh woman, you don’t need a man”.

Blanchett realised from the start that Jasmine was the anti-heroine, devoid of typical noble characteristics. But more often than not she seems the Mad Woman in the Attic. Unlike our Victorian anti-heroines who were left to disintegrate on their own, Jasmine’s rupture is made public. But like them, she seems a foil to the domestic or at-home heroine (in this case her sister Ginger, played by Sally Hawkins).

Anti-heroes tend to be the most interesting characters, as another word for them could be ‘human’. But Jasmine as the anti-heroine isn’t human, or most human, instead, she is a Xanax-addled gold-digger.

While Woody Allen’s characters have always reigned over the neurotic, they have always succeeded in creating empathy in the audience because they allow humour to filter through their fractures. However, Blue Jasmine is desperately devoid of humour. And even though we might cringe at how Jasmine unspools and winds herself into tiny and large knots, we feel nothing.

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (“into”) and pathos (“feeling”). It implies entering into another’s state of feeling or emotions. This entry might happen for a number of reasons, but one of them is fear; that uncomfortable realisation that the same events and fate might befall us. But with Jasmine, however frightening it might be to watch her hollow herself out and expose all her effluents, one feels no empathy for her.

We feel little because even if she might attempt to learn computers (come on, even a Hampton wife knows Word!) and become independent, all she is doing is whiling away her time till she can reel in a man. Her need for a man, her inability to define herself beyond whose wife she is, makes it impossible for one to care deeply for her. She remains unable to think beyond the confines of chauvinistic domesticity.

Assistant Editor

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