For Ocean's Eight (2018), four Tweets

For Ocean's Eight (2018), as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge, four Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
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18 July

For Ocean's Eight (2018), as seen at The Light Cinema, Cambridge, four Tweets

Little did one imagine, watching A Room with a View (1985), that Helena Bonham Carter's fetishistic Bellatrix Lestrange would be one of the best things about the Harry Potter films - or that her wit, gracing @oceans8movie earlier at @lightcambridge, would make it worth a watch... pic.twitter.com/2fM1B5GirQ

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 18, 2018

Sandra Bullock may have lead billing, and hair and make-up have her look striking (in a Victoria Beckham way?), but the screen-presence of such as Cate Blanchett outclasses her, and even @loganluckymovie makes a greater fist at plausibility than Gary Ross' directing / co-writing.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 19, 2018

In the year of the Merchant Ivory film, @IMDb tells us that blast-from-the-past Griffin Dunne (Paul Hackett in After Hours) is the (unseen) Parole Board Officer :https://t.co/C7FwKVVW9f

James Corden (John Frazier) is also hilarious, trying to investigate some of the nonsense !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 19, 2018

In @empiremagazine, 'Blanchett is cool personified, Paulson probably has the most to do (she has a run-in with Vogue editor Anna Wintour cooing over Roger Federer), Awkwafina is a lively presence, and Rihanna effortlessly erases the memory of Battleship.'https://t.co/3WCnTk8EGs https://t.co/6vaZDmCW3h

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 19, 2018

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Song to Song : Much better made than Knight of Cups, but still well-made tedium

This is a reaction, by accretion, to Terrence Malick's latest, Song to Song (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
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23 August

This is a reaction, by accretion, to Terrence Malick's latest, Song to Song (2017)

Though much better made than @knightofcupsmov, it remains well-made tedium, with zero conviction that Fassbender makes Gosling or Mara stars pic.twitter.com/Qjg1coERYe

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 23, 2017

Not explicable even by @songtosongmovie's inner conceit that Cate Blanchett (Amanda) is more alive / less unreal, she outclasses the others. pic.twitter.com/mpXkQYPLPy

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 23, 2017

Nothing that Stephen Poliakoff didn't do better in Friends and Crocodiles, or Truffaut or Sorrentino in Jules et Jim or La grande bellezza ! pic.twitter.com/J7GNzUKeM0

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 23, 2017

Plangently voiced over by Rooney Mara (Faye) as :

We thought we could just roll and tumble, live from song to song, kiss to kiss.#SoWeSaw pic.twitter.com/YzM3sx2tE8

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 24, 2017

By all means, it can pass for a point that all this looks cod, because it's stale / has lost its savour, but lost-generation stuff - again ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 25, 2017

His being an auteur, Terrence Malick can, of course, interpret that to mean doing what he wants - desiring, as his characters* grandiosely emptily do, 'to be free', and / or 'to set others free' (sc. delude themselves, and / or screw others over, in the name of Freedom).

If Malick chooses, he can have us infer (and maybe agree) that he is painting with light, and that we are redundantly seeking a narrative (which he does not actually have, and so cannot deny us) - until he then gives us one, of sorts, but only once he has had his way with our mind, with his fractured slices**.

[...]



Film-references :

* Hideous Kinky (1998)

* Jules et Jim (1962)

* La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty [but #UCFF prefers 'Immense Beauty' as a title]) (2013)

* On the Road (2012)

* The Last Station (2009)

* The Master (2012)

* The Neon Demon (2016)




Interlude ~ Irreverent parody No. 1 :


The travel of Song to Song is from deliberately momentary snatches of the past - which have been blanked out by the actors, in confused guilt and shame at having been paid to arse around implausibly on camera - to healing (and, of course, the pay-cheque).

However, this only comes through expressionless (and barely cleansing ?) confessional utterances, spoken to God knows whom (an on-line diary, via voice-recognition ? or a very professionally indulgent therapist ?). Thus, if just as implausibly, they become reconnected with good, honest, Tolstoyan toil on - dare one say so ? - the soil that they had spurned.


In essence, the road's shown to be tough, but (for actors, at least) healing for careworn hedonism can be won by lost wild-child rockers-in-their-heads stars of screen !



Other references :

* Friends and Crocodiles

* The Diamond as Big as The Ritz ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

* The Lost Ones [Le dépeupler] ~ Samuel Beckettt


End-notes :

* If we may rightly call them that... Gosling, though perhaps never heard called that, is credited as 'BV' = boundlessly vacant, as Gosling usually does / is, or boulevard verdure ?

** Naturally, Woody Allen and Charlotte Rampling (as Dorrie) did this with far greater impact in Stardust Memories (1980).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

All made up and nowhere to go ~ ‘So lonely’, The Police*

This is a review of Babel (2006)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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1 March

This is a review of Babel (2006)

* Contains some spoilers *

Cinematographically, this film has so much to offer – the variety alone of editing, from conventional montage to cross-cutting to fast-style sequences, promises a lesson in how to make a film that properly uses the natural resources and flexibility of the medium. Or there is Cate Blanchett, showing her class (opposite Brad Pitt**, whose part is more limited and, on immediate sight, played less impressively, although he does bring greater nuance to the intimate scenes) – she evidences why she was heading for all those awards with Blue Jasmine (2013). (Yet we then reasonably ask, on this showing of depth of interpretation, why Blanchett did not get a chance to shine so brightly before being given 2014’s Academy Award (@TheAcademy) and BAFTA (@BAFTA) (except on some conventional notion that you work yourself up from so-called supporting roles, and from nominations for best actress) ?)

That said, Babel (2006) proves to outlive its 143 minutes, and its overly neat wrapping-up and tying-together of the initially disparate strands of Japan, Morocco, and Mexico, skipping between them largely at whim (for, even if one did work out the time-differences, the narrative necessarily dances around in a period of some seven days), leaves one wanting to imagine that its saving grace was parodically being a skit or jam on the principal themes of a range of earlier films from something like Thelma and Louise (1991) to The Sheltering Sky (1990) and even Enter the Void (2009). When doing that, too, it does so delightfully, moving through a range of styles – as well as one moment taking us up close, with a woman (Blanchett) being carried around the narrow, dirt streets of Tarazine by her husband (Pitt), and next giving us an elevated long-view, before, having let us absorb that moment of aloofness, taking us back to something more like a medium shot.

Very promisingly, this use of varying the point of view connotes a thoughtful approach, one that seeks to disengage us from simply submersive uses of the cinematic medium, which can just have us as non-participating, non-questioning consumers of images (and other elements, such as sounds and music)… In the end, though, none of this appearance does amount to fulfilling the initial offer of non-commercial film-making, or, therefore, of being much more than a technical exercise in toto. It is additionally one with diminishing returns, because its underlying story-telling and value-base more and more resemble typical mainstream cinema, not what appeared to be a more unemotional pursuit of using intellect to penetrate how narrative works and persuades.

Thus, one could see its lasting achievement as assuredly in having helped show The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer how to adapt David Mitchell in their film Cloud Atlas (2012), and those film-makers do so with more impact and focus, and less of a pervading sense of banality. So, for example, Jim Broadbent’s (Tim Cavendish’s) strand in Cloud Atlas has variety of light and shade within it, but it does not – any more than, say, does that of Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess) – keep darting around in search of pastiche, whereas this film really does it so much that, by the end, it feels not enlarged as a piece of cinema, but wafer thin. (Except, that is, unless intended as the kind of survey of cinema itself that Holy Motors (2012) was purportedly pleasing us by being ?)

Subverting expectations for the sake of it is one thing, but, when the closing shot came, a clever and daring zoom-out (actually necessarily facilitated by CGI), it was the predictable moment where Babel finally had to conclude, as confirmed by our receding gaze (when we had begun with nothing more than the noise of wind impacting a microphone, a sort of blank slate of the imagination ?) : despite all the artistry of the making, and (fully as importantly) of the unsettling of the status of the story and its telling, it ended with a confirmation of a mundane post-modern world-view.

The suspicion is that it might have been better, if, when screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu had this idea for a film, they had selected better from other ideas available to them. For the philosophy here is the typically sentimental one that glibly believes that, despite the noise, the signal always has to be there (however faintly), and so it is this kind of signal that (implausibly) brings the father (Jack Hall : Dennis Quaid) to the [rescue of] the son (Sam : Jake Gyllenhaal) in The Day After Tomorrow (2004) via IMDb (@IMDb)] – in the truest tradition of stories of human endeavour (let alone of Lassie Come Home (1943) and its once-popular genre) ! Admittedly, Babel spared us the utter cant that is The Day, whose writers actually seem to believe that showing this individual and isolated familial act of striving for, and of making, a connection brings weight (or relevance) to the massive scenario of geothermal disaster, but it is not altogether so dissimilar :

In essence, Babel appears to make an assertion about the nature of the world and of our interrelatedness, but it is one almost without meaningful moral implications or consequences. For, in one case, we are invited to empathize with Pitt, when he tries to plead with his suffering former fellow coach-passengers to wait in the heat without air-conditioning (amongst them, star-turns such as Harriet Walter and a belligerent Peter Wight), but any rationale either what the coach staying achieves, or why the driver could possibly be so low on fuel that cooling the coach imperils their onward travel, is so inadequately established that it really feels more like Pitt insisting that they all stay because he expects that they would, and so believes that they must: My wife was shot when we were with you, so aren’t we all in this together ?

The artificiality of the reasoning makes that sequence fall wide of the mark, and we are, as with The Day, reduced to the idea of the American man fighting, pioneer style, for his family’s needs again. Fine for him to curse and rant at the locals, but (despite all the film’s seeming objectivity, relativism even, at other times) we have scant perspective on this. Yes, we are given the stereotype, when the coach has gone and the air-ambulance arrived, of the moneyed guy who tries to use cash to show his appreciation – not realizing that it is an insult to the true and genuine hospitality and care that his wife and he have been shown – but does anything hang on this passing gesture of Western imperialism / domination (except, maybe, that he is later kind to someone in relation to his children back home…) ?

By all means, we have the fog of war descending on how both the US government slants its interpretation to report a terrorist act against one of its citizens*** (confusingly, Pitt’s fellow tourists, on a coach registered in Casablanca, are talking about Cairo), and what the outcome of the shooting is reported to be, and we are briefly shown how t.v. in the States milks this story of one of its own, but this is small beer, again made little of except in passing. (Not that it needed hammering home, but hardly a Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum) (1975) here, then… ?) Instead, the film seriously seems to endorse a comforting signal that amounts to the tenets of Six Degrees of Separation (though the 1993 film of that name, which adopted the alleged principle, sounds better than one gave it credit for) or stochastic processes (The Butterfly Effect, so called) to show that, somehow, we all count and are not alone… Or, in two words that served E. M. Forster as a motto (and which T. S. Eliot, his Bloomsbury fellow writer, then appears to have aggrandized ?) :

Only connect

Which brings us back to Cloud Atlas, since it dares to show us people dying for their beliefs, and then being vindicated by the mysterious forces that operate in history – rather than a woman who somehow has to be thought to imagine that (whatever her precise immigration status may be) all is bound to be well, if she crosses the border into Mexico (rather than that her adventures will catch up with her, and will see her deported from her home of sixteen years). Still, at least we see her reunited with her nephew, who has inexplicably escaped the consequences of his dangerous actions****.

The wedding that she first went to Mexico for, just as the larking with the boys and going to the disco in Japan, have a free and celebratory feel, which maybe fits with the end of her story being meant to be inspiring after all ?


In closing, perhaps we might think what other films seem to have learnt from Babel, doing, for example, sustainedly what it found expedient only to do in part : one that may owe a debt is Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), for its uninterrupted moods are there, as if they are oases of tranquillity, created to contrast with the frenetic, and so is its convoy of police vehicles, winding their way across a landscape of features unfamiliar to their drivers.

And, in film, dramatic irony can be used very badly, so that knowing what is going to happen negates the experience of watching (whether the irony arises because the script truly shares knowledge with us that is unknown to others, or on account of our spotting a cue (and realizing its significance in the plot’s direction) that was not intended, and so we foresee an action / revelation). Here, knowing the beginning from the end, makes being with the passengers on the coach a moment that is painfully tense, because we know what will happen – even so, it is a tension that the film keeps, but lets slip away, ending up not holding a candle to equivalent scenes of someone else’s hospitality, in the dark, in The Sheltering Sky.


End-notes

* At one point in Gustavo Santaolalla’s score, one could swear Sting’s ‘How fragile we are’ is quoted (from the album Nothing Like The Sun), whose Latin feel and slow tempo fit the adjacent mood…

** Irritatingly, unless actually to satirize Western media domination and power politics (an interpretation of this film’s aims that seems difficult to sustain with much conviction), Pitt and Blanchett are given star billing (but need they have taken it, and so been given pre-eminence in the cast over equally valuable work by, say, Rinko Kikuchi (Chieko Wataya) or Kôji Yakusho (as her father, Yasujiro ?).


Sad, as using a title such as Babel is so resonant, too… :

* Jorge Luis Borges : ‘The Library of Babel’ (damning the Internet before its invention ?)

* Arthur Koestler : His compendious summing up of his life’s written works, Bricks to Babel

* Book of Genesis : Just nine verses (11 : 1–9) !

* Edmund Sears : ‘It came upon a midnight clear’


*** And, a little ropily (unconvincingly, except for this notion of connectedness (? on which, please see the next paragraph)), that brings in Japan, and the true origins and descent of the offending rifle. The reckless use of the rifle (several other scenes try to capitalize on the theme of the irrational, e.g. the wild drive away from the border control) puts one most in mind either of André Breton’s proposal of the ultimate Surrealist act (or maybe another song of Sting’s**** ?).

And of Yasujiro Wataya’s fond memory of Hassan Ibrahim, and asking after him, that translates into our recollection of his brutal interrogation, which proves the opposite point : the rifle links Japan and Morocco, but the man to whom it had been given is only in our mind…

**** Happy ending ? Well, not exactly, but, then again, we are whisked away, and not invited to consider what befalls someone who gratuitously takes pot-shots that endanger someone’s life, and wounds someone else in a fire-fight with the authorities (even if they do call off the attempt to shoot dead his father, brother and him), or the father who sends them off with the gun, or the man who (illegally) sells it ?

Certainly, it seemed to suit the plot that his brother and he decided to loose off a few rounds, but little else (no more, at any rate, than that business, again plot driven (as was Blanchett’s status of health) with the police checking on the rifle). Getting back to Sting, his song ‘I hung my head’ (from the album Mercury Falling) gave a better account of We wanted to test the rifle in :

I saw a lone rider
Crossing the plain
I drew a bead on him
To practise my aim


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Who is Woody Allen in Blue Jasmine ?

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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19 October (updated, with a 102-point rating, 20 October; Tweet added 1 January 2015)

This is a review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

I was waiting for something to happen - and it never did


Obviously, what is revealed about Jasmine (and to her) in the last ten or so minutes did not count for the person who made this comment - what sort of film was this meant to be in which this elusive 'something' might eventuate ?

Having seen Blue Jasmine (2013) exactly a month ago, on the opening night of Cambridge Film Festival, I was pleased to have watched it again, and pleased for Woody Allen that Screen 2 this Saturday night was sold out. Do I vainly hope for some of those people to go back and see some of the fifty or so other Allen films, whether or not they missed them before ?


If so, I would commend, in addition to the well enough known Annie Hall and Manhattan, these personal favourites :


Interiors (1978)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Love and Death (1975)



Back at the film, and the question posed, I have heard it suggested that Dr Flicker is the person closest to Allen himself (i.e. the parts that he writes for himself to play), and I watched him with that in mind. No, he is not Allen - Allen is, I think, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett).

Tuned to Allen, knowing almost all of his films, and having seen this one before, I could hear his cadences, his little excited rages in this role – not exactly, but Jasmine is the one who approaches his self-expression, his fluidity, his vocabulary and assurance. Listen for him, and I think that you will find his voice in Blanchett’s.

97 = S : 16 / A : 17 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 16

A rating and review of Blue Jasmine (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)


Meanwhile, back at the nub, the film is not as dark as Interiors, but it is a drama, and I hope that it is being appreciated for that, though one with the humour that Interiors almost entirely lacks : there are themes in common here, and the Allen who cut up footage of Charlotte Rampling for a vivid portrayal of her distressed state of mind (as Dorrie) in hospital in Stardust has long had, if not themes of mental health, then hints at it, and I respect him immensely for that.

Blanchett almost cannot fail to win something big for this performance, because, for me, it is so easily convincing, so true to the psychology of her life (explored more here) and to the experiences that she has, but I am, if anything, even more delighted at a peach of a role like this for the tremendous Sally Hawkins, who really shows what a versatile actor she is at playing a character who has a capacity to delight in the smaller things and be radiant – Allen had cast her in Cassandra’s Dream, and this new part she carries off perfectly.

As to the story, no, there is no big something, and I did not have to absorb two previous films as at the time of the previous viewing, but I am very pleased to run this one through again and see how beautifully it holds together. When Allen crafts a screenplay, as in Hannah (or Harry, or Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), there is nothing that one would change with it – when, for me, he does not, in Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), it is hard to know where and how one would rescue it.

So my hope is for people to be patient with Jasmine’s story, and the choices that she has made – when she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), she clicks into a fantasy where she has always been called Jasmine, etc., etc., and I could see her entering into straightaway believing things, just because she was saying them and wanted them to be true. We can reach back into the story, and see how much – and, at the same time, how little – she knew about what was happening and what she was doing, and how, as we see her doing all along with prioritizing her needs, she hurts her stepson and husband.

I also hope that they will look out some other Allen, not Midnight in Paris (2011), really, but maybe some of the ones that I have listed; that Hawkins now has the recognition that she deserves; that Allen keeps on with his film every year; and that good film-making like this will be taken to people’s hearts, and cherished.

Where did the Blanche DuBois characterization in Blue Jasmine (2013) really originate... ? : https://t.co/grhg1tGL9g Bananas (1971)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 2, 2015

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Three short reviews

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13 October

My Beautiful Country (2012) is a German production whose German name translates as The Bridge on the Ibar, and the English title refers to a Serbian national song that a group of Albanians who have been captured are asked to sing. We see one of them, Ramiz, given the chance to escape, but he ends up on the Serbian side of the river, and Danica, who has been widowed, takes pity on him when she finds that he has broken in.

Both Mišel Matičević and Zrinka Cvitešić are very strong and natural in these roles, and we see Ramiz develop in relation to one of her sons (Danilo), who has not spoken since his father died, whereas his elder brother Vlado has disaffection for life, and ends up behaving dishonestly. Petty jealousy upsets things and sets in train a course of events that provides a fulcrum for the story in the shape of the bridge. It is a powerful film that makes one sees how destructive what divides us can be, but ultimately offers hope.


With Hawking (2013), we had a documentary about the 71-year-old Cambridge professor that received what must have been a premiere, but was not billed as one. After a t.v. film in 2004, it sets out to be Hawking’s own account of his life, based on his script or early writings about his diagnosis with Motorneurone Disease.

The film used actors to represent some scenes, as well as contemporary footage and stills. All in all, just as the expanding universe (the famous Big Bang) was represented schematically by shapes and whirls, so, too, are key moments, with shots of parts of faces, or faces or bodies out of focus.

Once Hawking’s marriage to Jane had been described as breaking down in the face of a private life very different from a public one, much of the nineties and beyond was passed over quickly. So much so that one might be forgiven for thinking that the last thing that Hawking did was write A Brief History of Time in the late 1980s, not that he has made more discoveries about black holes recently.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy presided over question session with Hawking and various people such as film-maker Stephen Finnigan, but Hawking did not seem to be put at the centre of that experience, with Guru-Murthy’s back to him much of the time. Some strategically left before the end, rather than watch what – no reflection on the Festival – was quite embarrassingly weak.


Finally, Woody Allen was in thoughtful mood with Blue Jasmine (2013), with Cate Blanchett striking as a character a little reminiscent both of Tennesee Williams’ Blanche Dubobis (from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)) and of the mother in Allen’s own drama Interiors, from the late 1970s : though we did not always relate to some of Jasmine’s posturing, and maybe Sally Hawkins as Ginger was a little more uncomplicated (with Hawkins bringing a genuine enthusiasm to the role), Blanchett had a poise and a grace that made her the natural victim of Alec Baldwin’s duplicitous arrangements.

For his part, he was a man one could easily credit as pushing the boundaries of how to use apparent wealth to create businesses on top of businesses – and the film ably walked the tightrope between Jasmine’s memories of a hurtful past and how we see her try to extricate herself from acknowledging it. Ultimately, when she is confronted with it, we understand what she did when she felt herself humiliated, and Allen kept that moment for us : nothing is quite as it seems, and we gather what repercussions Jasmine’s instinct had for all.

There are laughs along the way, notably in the manner of Bobby Cannavale (as Chili), but no one should expect anything near as light as Midnight in Paris (2011) (or, though, as dark as Cassandra’s Dream (2007)).


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I'm a self-destructive fool (Thanks, Kate and Anna !)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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1 October

* Contains spoilers *

During late-night Festival drinks, @tobytram was heard to say (words to the effect of) :

He has the self-delusion that [...]


According to said Tram, it was 'semantics' when @TheAgentApsley pounced, querying what delusion there is other than oneself being deluded, because, as with a headache, no one else can experience it as one's proxy - also, which was perfect true, that The Agent's point was not germane to whatever point he had been making*.

OK. Can X give Y a delusion ? In the world of films, it is often a device, but is it an illusion or a delusion, if someone pretends to be Mr Ripley, Martin Guerre, The Tichborne Claimant, or even Danny Rose as the beard ?

As would meet with Mr Allen's approval to mention, what magicians do is called an illusion - that card that someone scribbled on appears to have been found inside a perfectly ordinary orange, but maybe we do not know how it was done. Are we deluded ? Would we only be deluded, as I was as a 3-year-old, when I believed that the father of my next-door playmate could really cause coins to appear about her person ?

In common parlance, maybe we do not make much distinction between the world - he has set himself an illusory goal as against he is deluded about his likely success. Where, I would suggest, we should be thinking is where the belief is immutably fixed and not susceptible to reason, which could, say, be the paranoid belief that one's neighbours have trained birds to defecate when the washing is on the line (as I was once told) :

If the person will not just accept that shit happens and maybe she is just unlucky, we would probably describe that as delusional thinking. If, on the other hand, it is merely an explanation that comes out of some conflict, with a rational status, with the neighbours and which might cause a person out of sorts to wonder, then I am imagining that being amenable to reasoned argument would make calling it a delusion less certain, not least since the thoughts have passed with reassurance that it is coincidence. Some, though, might still say that the woman had been deluded, I guess.


Which is where we come on to what distinction a self-delusion makes. Can one really, as the phrase has it, delude oneself ? It sounds as though it is something that the person has set out to do, whereas, if we say that X deluded Y, it sounds more deliberate still - what about considering Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine (2013) ?

Does Alec Baldwin delude Cate Blanchett, or does he believe in what he is doing, and it is just infectious ? If he deceives her about other women (he says that he is doing something, when he is really with one of them), is he not, maybe, deceiving her about the stability of her lifestyle ?

Has he, then, created in his own head a world that is not supported by reality with regard to his finances, and to his and their vulnerability ? Would that amount to a self-delusion, a conviction built on an earlier conviction, but essentially no more stable than a house of cards - or is it just a delusion, because it may not mean anything to say that Blanchett has a delusion, when she may just be gullible, overly trusting, turning a blind eye to what seems crooked ?

What if her delusion consists in choosing to believe that she can live the life that Baldwin offers - has he deluded her, and is the delusion of the same kind or character as the semi-fantasy world that she occupies in the non-flashback part of the world ? That behaviour seems more like delusion : what characterizes it is that she drifts into recollection involuntarily, her notion to become designer does not seem either founded on a rational plan (the fixed idea about learning via the Internet, although the Internet is not something with which she is at all familiar) or capable of listening to objections, and she verges on being uncontrollably grandiose.

For all of this, we can see a psychological mechanism, i.e. that she has been built up to think herself worthy of good things, but lacks the insight either to address the past and come to terms with it (which flashing back into it cannot do - it merely paralyses the present), or, because of that paralysis, to operate outside the inherited preconceptions about the world and her place and that of Sally Hawkins in it. There has, as we come to see, been trauma, but it is hard to say that the delusions that Blanchett now has about where she fits in were put there by Baldwin - he wanted her to believe in his illusion, or even share in it with him, but it can hardly be said that he wanted, as such, her to be delusional as we see her.


On my view, maybe she was (willingly) deluded about Baldwin's and her wealth and its fixity, and it allowed her to have and / or accord herself the position of a moneyed woman of leisure and cultivation. The delusional aspects of her thinking and the psychological make-up resulting from realizing the truth are contingent on what happened - after the trauma and initial treatment, she is no longer fully functional, but that was not a delusional state that Baldwin sought or directly caused. I cannot see her as having deluded herself in the life that she tries to lead with Hawkins, only that she is wracked by the past, and is motivationally and functionally unable to adjust to her straitened surroundings.

In the end, I am left feeling, by this analysis, that ascribing a motive of deluding another, or oneself, lacks credibility - a true delusional state in another might be very hard to engineer (although films from Hitchcock's to The Ipcress File (1965) purport to show us how), and to try to bring about a delusion for and in oneself might be self defeating.

It could be that we are better off forgetting agency or causation (unless we are therapists), and just recognizing rooted delusions when we see them, as against conditions of fear, phobia or mistrust that they will respond to logical analysis and reasoning...


End-notes

* As if words do not matter outside of their context ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)