Jasmine, a fallen New York socialite played by Cate Blanchett, is left emotionally brittle by the deceptions of her husband. Having fled to San Francisco to start anew, she is oblivious to the calamities that have stripped her of her station

Like many protagonists in Woody Allen’s movies, the title character in his new film, Blue Jasmine, sometimes speaks with a familiar stammer and exhibits a telltale existential dread. But beyond that, she could hardly be more different from her creator.

Jasmine, a fallen New York socialite played by Cate Blanchett, is left emotionally brittle by the deceptions of her husband (Alec Baldwin), a philanderer and a financial huckster. Having fled to San Francisco to start anew, she is oblivious to the calamities that have stripped her of her station. She continues to be obsessed with class and knows how to pronounce the name Louis Vuitton.

For all the illusions torn away from her by the end of Blue Jasmine, a comedy-drama written and directed by Woody, she stands as his latest distinctive female character in a roster full of them.

In the span of more than 40 of his films, including Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, strong and memorable women have become as much a hallmark of his movies as the venerable Windsor font in their credits. These are women who dominate and who are subjugated, who struggle and love and kvetch and fall apart, but they rarely conform to simplistic stereotypes. Jasmine may be deeply troubled, but at least she’s deep.

Yet almost nothing connects these characters — who have been played by actresses including Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz — except that they have all sprung from the mind of the same filmmaker, one who professes no real insight into how he writes and casts his female characters but remains confident that he still knows how to create them.

she the hunter and hunted

“People have criticised me for being narcissistic,” he said over iced tea at the Bemelmans Bar of the Carlyle Hotel in New York. “People criticised me for being a self-hating Jew, that’s come up. But not being able to create good women was not aimed at me very often.”

He may not wish to recall it, but his movies have also drawn charges of chauvinism and sexism, by detractors who have said they frequently depicted women as neurotics, shrews and prostitutes. This chorus reached a climax of sorts in the 1990s, when acerbic films like Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry were released and he had his notorious break-up with his frequent co-star Mia Farrow, who discovered his relationship with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, now Woody’s wife.

As the critic Steven Vineberg wrote in a 1998 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “More and more, ‘Woody’” — his on-screen persona — “has taken on the uncomfortable role of apologist for Woody, whose woman problems are by now as well known as his movies.”

Still, he has continued to create a steady supply of substantial roles for women, often of ages unrecognised by Hollywood (that is, anyone over 30), with Cate’s potent Blue Jasmine performance arriving in the middle of a summer movie season that has been largely devoid of female faces.

For successive generations of actresses, the opportunity to work in one of Woody’s films has become a kind of career validation. And for him, the phase of his career that began with the 2005 release of Match Point has seen him delve into female characters who are further removed from his life experiences, and more interested in finding their place in the world.

Scarlett Johansson, who starred in Match Point, Scoop and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, said that he “appreciates the versatility of the heroine, her ability to be both doe and lioness”. “His openness to the possibility that a woman can be both hunter and hunted allows him to explore more deeply the complexity of the female spirit,” she said.

Woody, 77, whose copper-coloured hair has mostly gone grey, and whose demeanor was more wistful than impish, could not immediately account for why women figure prominently in his work.

“They’re attractive, they’re complex, and the guys have never been portrayed superior to the women,” he said. “The guys are usually inferior, because they’re less grounded than the women.”

That surely applies to the nebbish Woody often plays in his own films. But those closest to him say the filmmaker should not be confused with his awkward, unknowing alter ego.

“That’s a role he can play easily,” said Letty Aronson, Woody’s sister and long-time producer. “It’s almost as if that’s what people expect. They don’t expect him to be a Cary Grant type.” Woody credits his romantic relationship with Diane that began in the 1970s with opening his eyes to the potential of female characters.

I believe Woody, at heart, would have been happiest to have been born as the classic opera diva.... He lives for dramatic flare, gossip, intrigue, crippling heartache and turmoil — just as long as it’s happening to someone else — Scarlett Johansson

annie hall & other women

Of his earliest films, he said, whether it was Bananas or Sleeper or Play It Again, Sam, whatever silly little thing, they were always from a male point of view — even Annie Hall, which begins with Alvy Singer speaking directly to the audience.

But when he started dating Diane Keaton, he said: “I started to appreciate her so much, personally and as an actress, that I started writing from the woman’s point of view.” In the movies that followed Annie Hall, he said: “It’s always more comfortable for me to write women.”

As Diane recalled it, their relationship was not unlike Annie Hall, with Woody becoming both her partner and mentor, offering her an attentive ear and introducing her to Freudian analysis.

“I was constantly complaining about things and constantly had this low self-esteem,” Diane said, “and had a tendency toward crying and worrying about why I wasn’t good enough, and he took it.”

The surest sign that Woody was listening to her was when she read his script for Annie Hall and her character’s voice sounded just like her.

“We can all feel it and understand it,” said Diane, who won an Oscar for her performance, “but we cannot write other people’s sounds.” Woody, she said, “can hear it — Annie Hall, flumping around, trying to find a sentence, that’s just remarkable what he did for me.”

In the years since, he has had little trouble casting the actresses he has wanted, landing the likes of Geraldine Page, Julia Roberts and Judy Davis, and helping earn Oscars for Dianne Wiest (a two-time winner, for Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets Over Broadway), Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite) and Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona).

But things were different in 1971. Juliet Taylor, Woody’s veteran casting director, recalled, “When an actress would come in, the producer would talk to them because Woody was too shy.”

Today, “many of his good friends are women,” she said. “He is one of the guys who you can really sit and chat on the phone with for hours.”

blue jasmine and cate

Woody Allen said that his female characters sometimes spring from his own best guesses of how women might react in certain situations. “Now this does not mean I feel it or think it accurately all the time,” he said. “I don’t.” But in the case of Jasmine, she was inspired by a woman he’d heard about from his wife. This woman, he said, was “a very high Upper East Side liver” who “had a precipitous drop and had to downsize radically”.

“She went from someone with charge accounts every place and a limitless amount of money, virtually, to someone who had to shop in bargain places and even get a job,” he said. Sensing the makings of classic tragedy, he said, “If there was some way that she brought it on herself, it could fulfil some of those Greek requirements.”

The Jasmine character may well invite further criticism of his perspective on women, and whether there is something antiquated about the idea of a woman whose world is shattered when she loses her money and her man. But Cate Blanchett said she had known similar people. “By circumstance or lack of confidence, their identity gets consumed by their partner,” she said.

Having played the opposite sex (played the character of Bob Dylan) in I’m Not There, she said she found a freedom in it that Woody might also take from writing women’s roles. “Often you can write more closely about your own perspective and experience of the world through a character of a different gender,” she said.

Cate said she tried to suggest as much to Woody while working on a scene for Blue Jasmine. “I said, ‘How would you do this, Mr Allen?’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, if I were playing the role,’ and I turned to him with a backwards grin and said, ‘You know, you could have played this role.’” Woody paused and thought about it “for a good minute and a half,” Cate said, “and then he said, ‘No, it would have been too comic.’”

Woody Allen, who cast himself as Blanche DuBois and Diane Keaton as Stanley Kowalski for a comic re-enactment of A Streetcar Named Desire in his film Sleeper, said that he often yearned to play the kinds of women he writes, who are given licence to be “emotional and sarcastic and flamboyant.” “I always wanted to play those parts,” he said. “I always felt I could play them because I feel those kinds of things.”

Scarlett Johansson affirmed that Woody had a feminine side in him that longed to break out.

“I believe Woody, at heart, would have been happiest to have been born as the classic opera diva,” she said. “He lives for dramatic flare, gossip, intrigue, crippling heartache and turmoil — just as long as it’s happening to someone else.”

But Woody dolefully accepted his role as an observer of women’s lives rather than an inhabitant. When he made his 1987 drama September, he said he wanted to play the role of an audaciously outspoken mother that instead went to Elaine Stritch.

Had he kept the part for himself, “it would have been a one-joke comedy,” Woody said. “They’d laugh when I came in, and after five minutes of that, they’d want to go.”

Dave Itzkoff
(New York Times News Service)
Which is your favourite Woody Allen film? Tellt2@abp.in