Last night Tatyana wanted to watch Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, which she’d never seen. I hadn’t seen it since the fall of ’13 so I half-watched it and half-wrote, and it somehow played a little better this time. Not that I found it problematic back then. I felt it was a reasonably good tragedy but saddled with a story that was too dependent on A Streetcar Named Desire.
Last night it somehow felt stronger, snappier. I can’t explain why. I was impatient with it six years ago; last night was a better ride.
Tatyana liked it a lot, but at the same time was strongly affected by the sad arc of Cate Blanchett‘s Ruth Madoff-like character. Jasmine is a delusional wife of a financial wheeler-dealer (played by Alec Baldwin) who’s suddenly broke and without a life after Baldwin is busted by the feds and then commits suicide in the slam.
I explained all the Streetcar parallels, but Tatyana hasn’t seen that 1951 film either, in part because it’s too old. She does, however, have a liking for young Marlon Brando.
It’s basically very, very tough to get Tatyana to watch anything. She only wants to watch “masterpieces,” she says. Only films on the level of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 days or A Separation…that line of country. She won’t sully herself with the watching of anything less than top-of-the-mountain classics, and she doesn’t like films that she doesn’t relate to personally in some deep-down way. And she won’t watch genre films or guy films like Heat, The Outfit or The Candidate. And she hates crap. I invited her to join me at a Long Shot screening, but she sensed trouble and declined. And nothing scary or violent.
Tatyana basically watches what she watches because she wants to watch it, and that usually means films with some sort of emotional lift or real-life resonance. Or if she has a special liking for the actor or actress.