A Streetcar Named Retribution

One of Ingmar Bergman's most overlooked and theatrical films is The Devil's Eye.  Released in 1960 and sandwiched between classics like Wild Strawberries and his Trilogy of Faith (Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence), it's easy to see how The Devil's Eye has become lost in modern film circles.  But it's one of Bergman's most inspired works.  The film opens with Don Juan seducing a young maiden only to have his conquest fizzle into nothingness at the moment of consummation.  You see, Don Juan is in hell, and his eternal punishment is to replay this Sisyphean game of seduction, without respite. 

Jasmine, played to neurotic snobby brilliance by Cate Blanchett in a likely Oscar nominated role, shares a similar fate.  The titular character in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, Blanchett is a cold, condescending gold-digger whose sole talent in life is to attract and gracefully seduce obnoxiously wealthy men.  This is in extreme contrast to her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), a simple woman drawn to salt of the earth types.  Their paths intersect when Jasmine's husband, Hal (Alec Baldwin), a not-so-thinly veiled version of Bernie Madoff, loses everything and hangs himself in his jail cell, leaving his estranged wife with no choice but to move from Park Avenue to live with her blue collar sister in San Francisco.

Yes, in Woody Allen's world, San Francisco is representative of a rough-talking, pizza-loving, grease-monkey working class because, obviously, his conception of the City by the Bay is stuck on Sam Spade and The Maltese Falcon. 

Jasmine, destitute, is forced, horror of horrors, to work as a dental assistant, and worse, share an apartment with her sister and two kids.  And yet, by the grace of the 1%, wealthy men find her irresistible.  Blanchett's best moment comes when she's dragged to a Marin County fête whose regal vacuousness quickly reminds her of own glorious Hamptons past.  When wealthy widower Dwight Westlake (Peter Sarsgaard) begins cooing to her of a home by the bay, a diplomatic mission in Vienna, and a potential future in politics, Jasmine realizes she unwittingly has got a live one.  The universe is restoring her innate place at the top of the social order.  The light in her face is reilluminated as she instantaneously spurns her unbalanced self-pity for a confident, alluring, and completely fraudulent air.  Jasmine's transmutation alone is worth the price of admission. Dwight falls for her immediately.

Somewhat clumsily (Allen loves churning out these films with such frequency that sometimes details aren't given the attention they deserve), it all falls apart for Jasmine, via Andrew Dice Clay in an understated performance as Ginger's ex-husband Augie who was burned personally and professionally by Jasmine and her criminal husband, and her dreams are once again fizzled into nothingness just at the moment of material consummation.  It's a classic morality tale of the pitfalls of greed, pride, and selfishness.  Maybe in some seventh circle, Don Juan and Jasmine will find each other.  

Rome, The Absurd City

To Rome With Love is easily Woody Allen's most uproarious film since Deconstructing Harry. 
  
Introduced by a working traffic cop/raconteur, four interspersed -- but not intersecting -- sketches provide a peek into the wild possibilities of the "Eternal City."  The farce that ensues is equal parts Shakespeare and Fellini, tied together by Allen's weightless style.  

Each vignette is imbued with an element of the supernatural or absurd.  Jerry (Woody Allen) is a retired avant-garde opera manager who comes to Rome to meet his daughter's Italian fiancé and his family.  When the future groom's undertaker father begins singing magnificently in the shower, Jerry pounces on his chance to get back in the opera game.  The only catch is, the father (renowned tenor Fabio Armiliato) can only sing in the shower. The gag avoids getting stale, and, in fact, culminates in a most hysterical staging of Pagliacci.

Equally outrageous is the phantasmal story of Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a young architecture student living in Rome with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig), who happens upon the renowned architect, reduced to designing shopping malls, John (Alec Baldwin).  John becomes Jack's ghostlike confidante and guide, longingly walking him through the tumult that results when Sally (Ellen Page), the girlfriend's best friend, crashes into their lives with her histrionic, failed actress, pseudo-intellectual, sexual energy.  Baldwin's Jack is an apparition savvy to all the seductress' moves, yet clearly still eager to be vicariously victimized. 

Two Italian language vignettes perpetuate the farce, as Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) is an average family man and bureaucratic clerk who suddenly, and most nonsensically, becomes the object of the media's lust. The scenes of paparazzi obsession ("Leopoldo, when your head itches, which hand do you use to scratch it?") are like watching Fellini direct from beyond the grave. As always, Benigni crafts the most mundane tasks, like waking up and turning off an alarm clock, into inexplicable hilarity. 

Finally, Anna, a prostitute, as stunning as she is uncouth, is played by Penélope Cruz, whose comedic talents flourish under Allen's lens as brilliantly as her dramatic ones do under Almodóvar's. Anna inadvertently gets sucked into a role of posing as the young wife for a newlywed, Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi), who must impress his big-city industrious uncles in order to secure his financial future.  When the party visits the Sistine Chapel, someone remarks on the breathtaking ceiling art, and rhetorically asks, "Can you imagine working all day on your back?" the response from Anna isn't hard to imagine.

Allen's strongest comedic work actualizes when he unleashes his inhibitions and indulges his farcical roots.  In To Rome With Love, Allen expertly combines the zaniness of his early work like Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask, with the smooth professionalism of his later work. The product is a hysterical, fast-paced, outlandish gem of a comedy. Now back to that production of Pagliacci...