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Post by pim on Oct 8, 2013 9:30:57 GMT 10
I saw the movie last week. As a rule I'm not fond of Woody Allen but I was persuaded to go by a friend and I'm very very glad I went. In my view this is Cate Blanchet's best performance ever. It could win her an Academy Award.
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Post by jody on Oct 8, 2013 10:09:01 GMT 10
She is an amazing actress.
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Post by pim on Oct 9, 2013 11:13:10 GMT 10
I got a hold of the DVD of the 1950s b/w film version of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desirewith Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. Apparently Brando had acted in the stage production on Broadway in the late 1940s but not Leigh. The movie version won a string of Academy Awards and you can see why.
I take nothing away from Cate Blanchet's performance in Blue Jasmine. She is magnificent in the role of the woman who traded in on her looks and grooming to live a life of luxury only to fall on hard times in which her superficial values and obsession with brand name products and appearances show up her shallowness and hollowness. Blanchet's acting style in Blue Jasmine is completely different from Vivien Leigh's acting style in Streetcar but that's a function of the fact that about 60 years separate the two movies and back in the 1940s and 1950s movie actors acted as if they were still on stage acting before a live audience. So to compare Blanchet's interpretation of the character of Jasmine with Leigh's interpretation of the character of Blanche is an unfair comparison. So I won't even try. The real comparison is, in the case of each movie, to look at the whole as greater than the sum of its parts and to make your choice on that basis. I have no trouble coming down on the side of Streetcar. It is a knockout movie and a true b/w classic.
I'm trying to work out why I find Streetcar such a knockout compared with Blue Jasmine. I loved the "film noir" aspect to it that the 1950s b/w gives to the movie, but it's more than that. It has to come down to the synergy of Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh working together. Brando is, I think, the X factor. The way he played the coarse and rough & tumble working class brother-in-law Stanley, who is married to Blanche's sister, and who ruthlessly exposes and ridicules Blanche's fantasies and superficialities, and the way she lies not just to other people but to herself, is immensely powerful.
In critiques I've read of Streetcar the movie is known for an issue of censorship that arose in the making of the movie. The character Blanche is consumed with guilt over the suicide of her former "beau" Allen. The innuendo is that Allen was gay, but it isn't explicitly mentioned in the movie. To me, if that's the only thing that people know the movie for then they've not understood the movie. It was, after all, the 1950s and movies were censored for anything that offended against what was termed "decency". If anything all that did was to put movie directors and actors on their mettle and they found other ways to explore sexual themes. What springs to mind are two scenes in From Here to Eternity, which was filmed around the same time as Streetcar. The movie couldn't show the characters played by Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr portraying a sex act so they conveyed sexuality by other means. There's the kiss scene on the beach of course with the waves crashing over them. That's the best known and most famous scene. But there is another one in the movie which I think conveys sexuality in a much subtler and more sensual way which comes before the kiss scene on the beach. The Burt Lancaster character goes to the house of the Deborah Kerr character ostensibly to deliver something for her husband who is the Lancaster character's commanding officer. The weather is absolutely foul outside and he is soaking wet from having come there through the rain. She is very short with him and grudgingly asks him in, saying her husband is not at home. They proceed to have a heated argument. She (the character) is a very angry and unhappily married woman who fancies the Lancaster character and the sexual tension that the two actors convey in the argument scene is palpable. The scene ends with them kissing passionately after shouting at each other and the camera moves to outside the house in the pouring rain. We the audience see the two of them kissing passionately through the kitchen window that is streaming with rain, the raindrops forming rivulets and streams down the window pane. It's the sexiest scene you'll ever see in those old b/w movies and it's still a great scene.
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