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## Chapter 23 Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine
作者：Shonni Enelow
1-The grammar of the performance is the narrowing and widening of her eyes. Half-mooned, they're self-satisfied; teasing, but protective. Rounded, they're glassy, stunned, close to spilling. When she narrows them, it's attached to a close-lipped smile, cheekbones lifted like a shield; widening them, she leans in and lowers her chin, tilting it just slightly off-center. You could trace the trajectory of the performance through the fate of her eye makeup: at first immaculate, it later blurs and cakes, the mascara bleeding in spidery black marks on her face, shrouding her eyes in a muddy mask. Finally it disappears completely, leaving them vague and pale.
“There was no one like Hal,” Cate Blanche's Jasmine confides to her first-class seatmate, assured and confident, in the first scene of Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013). She's on a plane, well dressed and relaxed-looking, and her conversation is animated and warm, as she takes pleasure in her own expressiveness, her charm in full flower. “One more year and I would have graduated,” she drawls in semi-Boston style, in a mid-Atlantic diction worthy of Katharine Hepburn (whom the actress, as we may know, once played). When she tells her interlocutor she met Hal, her husband, at a party while “Blue Moon” was playing, then asks, not quite innocently, if she's heard of it, it's our first clue that there's not just something affected about Jasmine's performance, but something contrived, unconvincing, and, like her accent. vaguely anachronistic: who hasn't heard of “Blue Moon”? The woman in the next seat assents politely but slightly ironically; then, as the scene cuts to the airport, the tone shifts. Out of first class and onto a crowded escalator, Jasmine has stopped smiling. She's still in command, but tense, anxious, slightly shaking her head as she chats about her nervous breakdown. By the time she's waiting for the baggage, she's scattered, out of focus, her eyes roving, her speech jumping from one topic to another. Now she's not quite addressing her former seatmate except to toss off an occasional surprising, irrelevant remark. Her behavior seems more and more incongruous. We're aware of the mismatch between the situation and what she's saying, as when she tells her obviously uninterested interlocutor that she's come to San Francisco to stay with her sister Ginger, and that they were “both adopted." This information, exposition framed as such, gives another clue to what the film's Allen is up to: in Blue Jasmine, Jasmine's attachments, such as they may be, are all tenuous and easily broken, and she's not only out of place but strangely out of time, unmoored from all positions, both geographic and familial.
## Chapter 23 Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine
作者：Shonni Enelow
1-The grammar of the performance is the narrowing and widening of her eyes. Half-mooned, they're self-satisfied; teasing, but protective. Rounded, they're glassy, stunned, close to spilling. When she narrows them, it's attached to a close-lipped smile, cheekbones lifted like a shield; widening them, she leans in and lowers her chin, tilting it just slightly off-center. You could trace the trajectory of the performance through the fate of her eye makeup: at first immaculate, it later blurs and cakes, the mascara bleeding in spidery black marks on her face, shrouding her eyes in a muddy mask. Finally it disappears completely, leaving them vague and pale.
“There was no one like Hal,” Cate Blanche's Jasmine confides to her first-class seatmate, assured and confident, in the first scene of Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013). She's on a plane, well dressed and relaxed-looking, and her conversation is animated and warm, as she takes pleasure in her own expressiveness, her charm in full flower. “One more year and I would have graduated,” she drawls in semi-Boston style, in a mid-Atlantic diction worthy of Katharine Hepburn (whom the actress, as we may know, once played). When she tells her interlocutor she met Hal, her husband, at a party while “Blue Moon” was playing, then asks, not quite innocently, if she's heard of it, it's our first clue that there's not just something affected about Jasmine's performance, but something contrived, unconvincing, and, like her accent. vaguely anachronistic: who hasn't heard of “Blue Moon”? The woman in the next seat assents politely but slightly ironically; then, as the scene cuts to the airport, the tone shifts. Out of first class and onto a crowded escalator, Jasmine has stopped smiling. She's still in command, but tense, anxious, slightly shaking her head as she chats about her nervous breakdown. By the time she's waiting for the baggage, she's scattered, out of focus, her eyes roving, her speech jumping from one topic to another. Now she's not quite addressing her former seatmate except to toss off an occasional surprising, irrelevant remark. Her behavior seems more and more incongruous. We're aware of the mismatch between the situation and what she's saying, as when she tells her obviously uninterested interlocutor that she's come to San Francisco to stay with her sister Ginger, and that they were “both adopted." This information, exposition framed as such, gives another clue to what the film's Allen is up to: in Blue Jasmine, Jasmine's attachments, such as they may be, are all tenuous and easily broken, and she's not only out of place but strangely out of time, unmoored from all positions, both geographic and familial.
2-There's in fact something tenuous about all of Jasmine's behavior, even in the memory scenes when we see her in her tony former existence as an Upper East Side wife. In our first trip into Jasmine's past, occasioned by her dismayed entrance into her sister's (supposedly ****by) San Francisco flat, we see Jasmine and her husband (Alec Baldwin) coming through the door of their 5th Avenue apartment. If in San Francisco Jasmine was jittery, tentative, and easily ruffled, in her supposedly golden memories we notice she's still slightly awkward on her feet. Her very high heels and bootcut jeans make her seem oddly coltish, a bit uncertain. And then there's her voice, which is a little too sing-song, its tones a little put-on -- “You shouldn't spoil me so!” -- and Hal's clunky, expositional dialogue, “Did I tell you my news?” Something is off; it feels staged, forced, strained. We hear and see that over-dramatization again, as she mimes to the serving staff at an elegant dinner party we cut to next, and in an ostentatious interruption of the conversation delivers a scripted-seeming line about recalling “Blue Moon," part of her performance just as is Hal's next line: “I fell in love with the name Jasmine.” Dutiful cooing at the dinner table. We cut back to the present and find Jasmine sitting alone Ginger's apartment, filmed from behind, so that only the corner of her face is visible. “I changed it,” she says to no one, finishing the remembered conversation, “Yeah, Jeannette had no panache.” The contrast (in tone as well as setting) between the memory and the present is striking, but so is the fact that her face is very similar in both, now just a bit muted: it's the world that has changed around her, and as a result — in a kind of Kuleshov effect —her narrowed eyes and affected smile suddenly look sneering, bitter. This is the first time we see her talking to herself, the sign of her encroaching madness, and it's telling that what Jasmine is talking about here is her own characterization. Jasmine is a role; Blanchett is playing an actress.
3-James Naremore wrote of Marlene Dietrich, “She inhabits a realm where visible artifice becomes the sign of authenticity” (131). Cate Blanchett, in contrast to many of her contemporaries, has always been a performer unafraid of overt artifice. Her theatrical flair and self-aware magnetism call to mind a different generation of star, someone who belongs in the pantheon with Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn. And among her peers she's also the most convincingly theatrical animal (to use Elia Kazan's delicious phrase, describing himself and Tennessee Williams), a full-bodied actress equally at home onstage as on camera. A flexible, quick-witted, and responsive scene partner, she also projects a command of her own presence and an unapologetic enjoyment of that command that some find unnerving, if not off-putting. This is why she can play icons: Elizabeth I (in Elizabeth (1998), her break-out role), Hepburn herself (in The Aviator (2004)), Bob Dylan (in I'm Not There (2007)). We are never afraid for Blanchett, as we watch her; even when she plays victims or dupes (in The Talented Mister Ripley (1999), for Instance), her vulnerability is never total. Instead, as in the opening scene of Blue Jasmine, in which her blathering remains too snide to garner much pity, she teeters on the edge of our dislike, rarely tempering fundamental coolness with direct appeals to our sympathy. If she remains, nonetheless, an emotionally resonant actress, it's tribute to the way she has thematized her own charisma as a star, often directly or indirectly making her power of command part of the dynamics of the role. However self-aware, though, her performance in Blue Jasmine is strikingly low in irony. The dashes of affectation (the theatrical line readings, the divaesque self-righteousness) remain just this side of camp, and they're injected with enough classic psychological realism to frame them as strategic characterization choices, rather than a total style. More than anything else, Blue Jasmine is a character study of a person ripped from her context, a “performer” whose “theater" has suddenly disappeared, mid-act.
### Acting the actress
4-Early on in Blue Jasmine, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), Ginger's ex-husband and one victim of Hal's (Bernie Madoff-style) fraud (Hal's wealth turns out to be criminal gains), admonishes Ginger about her sister: “You said it! You said to me: she's a phony and had to know.” But the accusation rings somewhat hollow. Jasmine both is and is not a phony. She did and did not know what her husband was doing. Instead, it's her world that's revealed to be phony: the Ponzi scheme her husband constructed, his lying assurances of fidelity, the elaborate pyramid of her cosseted life—all are revealed to be "mere” theater, built on fiction and deception, patriarchal privilege and the aspirational dreams of the middle class (pathetically demonstrated as Hal convinces Augie to invest their lottery winnings with his fraudulent company). And Jasmine, who once invented a self (changing her name, joining the upper class) now has to reinvent it: not remove the mask so much as don a new one. Naremore famously notes “a fundamental trope of realist film acting: the player assumes a representational stance, her gaze turned slightly away from the lens, and then makes at least two faces, both clearly visible to the audience, one coded as ‘suppressed’ the other as ‘ostensive’” (80). In Blue Jasmine, Blanchett does show us these two faces, but then repeatedly blurs them, calling into question realist acting’s foundational claims about the difference between the persona and the person. She’s almost always in motion — touching her hair, rocking forwards and backwards, fiddling with her jewellery or her martini glass —and when she breaks, it's not “down” but “apart”: she doesn't collapse as much as vibrate, toppling onto the couch, skidding out of the car and spilling the contents of her purse. Even her mental unraveling is as a shift into another form of fantasy, not a revelation of truth or depth, a less glossy, less sure act but not a “true self.” Blanchett the actress plays Jasmine the actress as a strategic fabrication for getting along in a world of artifice.
4-Early on in Blue Jasmine, Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), Ginger's ex-husband and one victim of Hal's (Bernie Madoff-style) fraud (Hal's wealth turns out to be criminal gains), admonishes Ginger about her sister: “You said it! You said to me: she's a phony and had to know.” But the accusation rings somewhat hollow. Jasmine both is and is not a phony. She did and did not know what her husband was doing. Instead, it's her world that's revealed to be phony: the Ponzi scheme her husband constructed, his lying assurances of fidelity, the elaborate pyramid of her cosseted life—all are revealed to be "mere” theater, built on fiction and deception, patriarchal privilege and the aspirational dreams of the middle class (pathetically demonstrated as Hal convinces Augie to invest their lottery winnings with his fraudulent company). And Jasmine, who once invented a self (changing her name, joining the upper class) now has to reinvent it: not remove the mask so much as don a new one. Naremore famously notes “a fundamental trope of realist film acting: the player assumes a representational stance, her gaze turned slightly away from the lens, and then makes at least two faces, both clearly visible to the audience, one coded as ‘suppressed’ the other as ‘ostensive’” (80). In Blue Jasmine, Blanchett does show us these two faces, but then repeatedly blurs them, calling into question realist acting’s foundational claims about the difference between the persona and the person. She’s almost always in motion — touching her hair, rocking forwards and backwards, fiddling with her jewellery or her martini glass —and when she breaks, it's not “down” but “apart”: she doesn't collapse as much as vibrate, toppling onto the couch, skidding out of the car and spilling the contents of her purse. Even her mental unraveling is as a shift into another form of fantasy, not a revelation of truth or depth, a less glossy, less sure act but not a “true self.” Blanchett the actress plays Jasmine the actress as a strategic fabrication for getting along in a world of artifice.
5-In her first scene with Ginger, for instance, she alternates between pleading and pretended casualness: “I need to stay here for a while. Na - I… I do. I'm out of cash. I couldn't pay my rent in Brooklyn. I mean do you believe I had to move out of my beautiful home and take a place in Brooklyn?” She's chattering but with intensity, her voice skipping from high to low range, and she peers intensely at Ginger, eyes widening. “But I'm dead broke. Really. I mean the government took everything. And the lawyers. No and I can't be alone, Ginger? I really get some bad thoughts when I'm alone.” She leans in, eyes even rounder, pointing a slightly shaking finger at her head. The self-justification is still there, but it seems panicked: she quickens her speech as her voice becomes husky. Ginger responds weakly, “Well, all I can say is that you look great.” “Ah - oh, now who's lying!” And Jasmine leans back and puts her face back on, smiling again, slightly cocking her head and narrowing her eyes, but also moving backwards, retreating, as she tries to be airy in her melodic, high-pitched voice. “You know I was up all last night”— she demurs, looks away and plays with her pearls, but still smiling narrow-eyed, ducking her head —“I was so anxious about”— almost making fun of herself —“moving here, I wasn't sure how ... (pause) ... angry you still were.” On the last phrase, her smile is there but her big eyes are back: her two faces, glamorous and desperate, come together. Then she quickly turns her back on her sister, turning in all directions: “Should I have another drink?”
6-Blanchett's performance here is multiply self-referential. Blue Jasmine an adaptation of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire — indeed, the film is more Streetcar than many critics have noted: Allen's scenes quoted directly from the play — and Blanchett’s performance clearly alludes to her previous interpretation of Blanche DuBois with the Sydney Theater Company, in a production directed by Liv Ullmann, which toured just a few years before Allen's film. It's a performance, in other words, that refers biographically to Blanchett's own experience as an actress as well as intertextually to another dramatic fiction. What's more, Blanche Dubois is not just any dramatic character, she is the archetypical American dramatic fiction of a woman as performer. Blanche's theatricality — her feminine stylizations, her efforts to turn her setting into a stage, with lighting and costume and sound — and her elaborate performances (as a knowing flirt with her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, as an ingenue for her sometime suitor Mitch) Williams emphasized over and over in his play. Blanche/Blanchett: the character and actress overlap and interpenetrate in Blue Jasmine. But they ultimately diverge. Like Blanche, Jasmine is a performer; like Blanche, we see her performance fall apart over the course of the film. But unlike both, Blanchett's control over the performance stabilizes and anchors the character's dissolutions in a triumph of actorly virtuosity, as in her first scene with Ginger. What we are watching is a dramatization of the difference between two kinds of performance: one failed (the character’s) and one a brilliant success.
7- With Blue Jasmine and Carol (2015), we might quip that Blanchett's career has entered its mannerist phase. Insofar as her Jasmine is a performance about Blanchett as an actress, it thematizes Blanchett's performance style, her steeliness and aristocratic bearing. It's a performance about command and control — what it means to command a scene, and what it feels like to lose control of one. All the spaces in the film are under male control: the tony Manhattan apartment, the Connecticut mansion, and the Hamptons beach house all belong to Hal, and all disappear when he does; her sister's apartment is controlled by Chili (Bobby Cannavale), the new boyfriend (in addition to Augie, the film's other Stanley Kowalski stand-in); the dentist's office where Jasmine works for a time is commanded, to repulsive effect, by the dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) who sexually harasses and assaults her; and her potential new paradise, a bay-view house in Marin County dangled out to her by the Prince Charming she meets at a party, the former diplomat Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), is swiftly retracted by him. In the film's diegetic climax, Jasmine's repeated cry is, “What am I doing here?” and it's a question that hangs over the performance as a whole. Where does she belong? What scene can she command?
8- There is a feminist subtext, whether or not Allen intended one, in the acknowledgment that however commanding in certain settings and under certain circumstances the female performance may be, it depends on the goodwill and even whim of the man who's really pulling the strings and, as such, is profoundly vulnerable. Even before the crumbling of her wealth and position, Jasmine's life proves to be precarious. After all, what caused her to turn her husband in to the FBI was his announcement that he was about to abandon her for a teenage au pair (in other words, it's possible to read Jasmine's fall as a punishment for aging). And Blanchett’s performance highlights this inequality: even “on the top of the world” with Hal, as Chili puts it, Jasmine is insecure, needy, and dependent on her husband's approval. Neediness, rather than calculation, is what drives her. As Blanchett plays it, even her decision to turn her husband in is a desperate grasp at control, not a play for revenge.
9- Jasmine is smart — she was an anthropology major and a straight A student — but she can't figure out how to navigate her new world. She does try. Blanchett's choice to highlight Jasmine's intelligence and pride, rather than her snobbishness, is on clear display in a bar scene between Jasmine and her dentist employer, where she reluctantly agrees to get a drink with him after work. At first, she is cynical and sullen, her face tired and eyes lowered. However, her lack of effort to please also renders her unusually frank; she even seems to be enjoying her increasingly drunken world-weariness. When the smarmy dentist makes his move she stares at him, incredulous and dismayed, her wounded pride registering through the slight furrowing of her brow. What Blanchett could have played with flippancy or contempt, instead she plays with intense focus that channels not disdain but rage: Jasmine knows she's trapped, but she refuses to be flattered.
9- Jasmine is smart — she was an anthropology major and a straight A student — but she can't figure out how to navigate her new world. She does try. Blanchett's choice to highlight Jasmine's intelligence and pride, rather than her snobbishness, is on clear display in a bar scene between Jasmine and her dentist employer, where she reluctantly agrees to get a drink with him after work. At first, she is cynical and sullen, her face tired and eyes lowered. However, her lack of effort to please also renders her unusually frank; she even seems to be enjoying her increasingly drunken world-weariness. When the smarmy dentist makes his move she stares at him, incredulous and dismayed, her wounded pride registering through the slight furrowing of her brow. What Blanchett could have played with flippancy or contempt, instead she plays with intense focus that channels not disdain but rage: Jasmine knows she's trapped, but she refuses to be flattered.
10-This is what makes the film's climax so genuinely heart-breaking. Discarded by the Marin prince Dwight, who finds out about her past, Jasmine stumbles for a last attempt at connection to the music shop where her ex-stepson Danny (Alden Ehrenreich) works. Her opening gambit is poorly pitched, but her slack face and eyes tell a different story. Danny is cold, however. He tells her he knows “the whole story," which we then watch unfold: Jasmine confronting Hal about his infidelities is gas-lighted by his cruel composure, and, in a panic, sobbing and gasping for air, she phones the FBI. “The moment I did what I did I regretted it," she begs Danny, who turns her away. How can our sympathy not be with Jasmine, whatever her selfishness? She's been rejected at every turn. When she gets back to Ginger's, sweating and disheveled, she's like a cornered tiger, growling miserably and impotently, but we can see in her pleading eyes and slightly opened mouth that she hears Ginger's critique that her cavalier selfishness and Hal's are the reason she failed. Jasmine swallows, and snaps back, narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips high-and-mightily. This final play at being Jasmine-in-command — the sing-song voice chattering knowingly with the high-cheeked half-smile, despite her wet eyes and face and tensed, diminished carriage — ends as she lies that she and Dwight will be spending "the next few years in Vienna,” her haughtiness massively undercut by her shaky unbuttoning of her dress.
11-Williams, in the end, holds out hope for his Blanche: flirting the doctor who comes to take her away, she ends the play in camp grandeur. Blue Jasmine does no such thing. Blanchett plays Jasmine, in the end, as confused and alone, truly pathetic. Once her failure to repair a semblance of a life feels complete, Jasmine is deflated: her hair wet, and wearing no makeup, she shuffles down the San Francisco street and sits on a bench, muttering to herself, distracted, her gaze far away. Unmoored from a filmic flashback, Jasmine's madness is complete: now she mutters lines that actually don't add up. The film gives her one final gift, however. The ubiquitous retro jazz on the soundtrack shifts into “Blue Moon," and for one last time, the film matches her fantasy "Blue Moon,” she mumbles, “I used to know the words. I don't know the words. Oh, they're all a jumble.”
11-Williams, in the end, holds out hope for his Blanche: flirting the doctor who comes to take her away, she ends the play in camp grandeur. Blue Jasmine does no such thing. Blanchett plays Jasmine, in the end, as confused and alone, truly pathetic. Once her failure to repair a semblance of a life feels complete, Jasmine is deflated: her hair wet, and wearing no makeup, she shuffles down the San Francisco street and sits on a bench, muttering to herself, distracted, her gaze far away. Unmoored from a filmic flashback, Jasmine's madness is complete: now she mutters lines that actually don't add up. The film gives her one final gift, however. The ubiquitous retro jazz on the soundtrack shifts into “Blue Moon," and for one last time, the film matches her fantasy "Blue Moon,” she mumbles, “I used to know the words. I don't know the words. Oh, they're all a jumble.”
### Playing madness
12-Without a theater, David Thomson writes, “the only thing an actor can do is play scenes alone in his room, or walk the streets talking the lines. We have all of us edged away from those talking people; you know the way we write them off as disturbed or troubled. As if anyone ever thought that successful actors had grown sane on the life of pretending” (87). Thomson's description of acting and its nearness to insanity, in both concept and appearance, provides a strikingly apt portrait of Blanchett's performance of Jasmine, whose sanity ebbs and flows throughout the film as she attempts to find what we call a world. It turns out that acting a woman who is always acting and acting madness aren't far apart. Playing a scene that isn't happening: isn't this what actors do? Framed slightly differently, it's what crazy people do, too. Jasmine first shows her mental disintegration by acting scenes without a scene partner: her dialogue with no one on the couch in her sister's house, on the street, at a party, where her conversation seems normal enough that someone nearby inquires whether she's talking to him. She could almost be an actress running lines.
12-Without a theater, David Thomson writes, “the only thing an actor can do is play scenes alone in his room, or walk the streets talking the lines. We have all of us edged away from those talking people; you know the way we write them off as disturbed or troubled. As if anyone ever thought that successful actors had grown sane on the life of pretending” (87). Thomson's description of acting and its nearness to insanity, in both concept and appearance, provides a strikingly apt portrait of Blanchett's performance of Jasmine, whose sanity ebbs and flows throughout the film as she attempts to find what we call a world. It turns out that acting a woman who is always acting and acting madness aren't far apart. Playing a scene that isn't happening: isn't this what actors do? Framed slightly differently, it's what crazy people do, too. Jasmine first shows her mental disintegration by acting scenes without a scene partner: her dialogue with no one on the couch in her sister's house, on the street, at a party, where her conversation seems normal enough that someone nearby inquires whether she's talking to him. She could almost be an actress running lines.
13-There's another track on which her disintegration runs, however, one that provides a counterpoint to these scenes where she is out of joint with the temporal reality of the story. At several points, Jasmine flies into miniature arias of psychic dissolution. Naremore notes that performances of “drunkenness or addiction provide excellent opportunities to show a character losing expressive control” (76), and indeed, Jasmine’s arias often appear when she’s drinking, as her eyes dampened her fidgeting becomes sloppy. In a scene adapted from Streetcar but tellingly transformed, Jasmine interrupts Chilli’s game-watching with his friends to ask if they can turn down the volume on the television set while she studies. In Streetcar, when Blanche and Stella come home to find Stanley and his friends still playing their poker game, Blanche's intrusions are flirtatious, provocative; in Blue Jasmine, they're anxious, overwhelmed. When Jasmine first appears in the doorway to the living room, she's already sweating and unkempt, and despite her attempts at holding it together — for the first part of the scene, she keeps her voice mostly steady, intoning in her melodic aristocratic cadence, with chin up — she loses it quickly when Ginger baits her with their mother's taunt that her, “she got the good genes.” Shaking her hands in two impotent fists by her face, she growls, “Aw, who do I have to sleep with around here to get a Stoli martini with a twist of lemon!” A pause, and then, just as quickly, as the room stills with embarrassment, she snaps out of it, glancing back and forth as she realizes what she's said. The unseemliness of her outburst is telling: it's a sudden jolt of camp in an otherwise realist scene. And not just any camp, but movie star camp. For a second, she is channeling a deranged Norma Desmond, vengefully demanding her due. Even these displays of Blanchett's prowess as a realist actress — able to move in and out of psychic states and convincingly “lose expressive control”—refer to Jasmine the character as a kind of actress in an acting lineage. If Allen's script provided the raw material for this allusion, it's Blanchett who makes it sing, her own technical brilliance and virtuosity giving us permission to enjoy the spectacle of an actress falling apart.
14-Vivien Leigh, the most famous Blanche DuBois of all, was given electroshock treatment during the London run of Streetcar. Our Jasmine was given “Edison's Medicine,” too, as she reveals in a darkly funny scene two with Ginger's two children at Chuck E. Cheese's. Thomson recounts Leigh's breakdowns during her tenure as Blanche in brushstrokes Jasmine well: “On several occasions," he writes, “Mrs. [Irene Mayer] producer, had to take Vivien off for electroshock treatment, which even then was known to disturb the memory, and discombobulate the personality — as if an underground pressure was being put on the actress to speak the part from out of herself — to blurt it out, under stress — rather than trust the lines” (90). This hardly describes Blanchett, but it does describe Jasmine, who blurs her performance so completely that once the run is over, she's bereft of all coherence.
## Works cited
Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Thomson, David. Why Acting Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.
## Works cited
Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Thomson, David. Why Acting Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.
