Blue Jasmine, review - Telegraph It is revealing that Jasmine, in Woody Allen's new film Blue Jasmine, isn't the original name of Cate Blanchett's character: she was christened with the sturdier Jeanette, but exchanged it for a moniker with a more romantic fragrance. In the right circumstances, of course, jasmine is a very effective climber, but a sudden social disgrace has halted her progress. Early on, we see Jasmine at San Francisco airport, willowy and worryingly garrulous, awaiting the arrival of her Louis Vuitton luggage while reminiscing without pause for breath in the general direction of a bemused elderly lady. Jasmine is clearly alone and flailing, over-friendly with strangers yet not quite focusing on them. A taxi ride, a huge tip and a few sedatives later, and she is in her sister Ginger's homely, cluttered apartment, precariously poised there like a racehorse in a Shetland pony's paddock. She attempts to be nice, but snobbery keeps breaking through. Her voice, lamenting and lecturing, has the timbre of wealth: here, it fills the small space, thoughtlessly grating on other people's sensibilities. She pleads poverty, but has travelled first class, since spending remains her chosen means of self-expression: "You know me, I splurge." Like a slowly shattering window, you can't quite take your eyes off her. The bones of her story - pieced together from the present narrative and in flashback - are that she and Ginger (an endearing Sally Hawkins) were adopted separately by the same parents, but it was Jeanette/Jasmine who seemed fated to go glamorous places. The elegant blonde was plucked from college before graduation by a wealthy, charismatic businessman, Hal (Alec Baldwin), and groomed for the life of the very wealthy, stuffed with the business of self-maintenance and radiant public philanthropy. Hal, a bluff, tanned Bernie Madoff-style character, built an empire on fraud: when it collapsed, Jasmine's life and cash-flow crashed with it. She is now heavily dependent, as her spiritual forerunner Blanche DuBois was in A Streetcar Named Desire, on the tolerance of relatives and the kindness of strangers. Allen's film - one of his most socially astute - reflects America talking to itself about decency, respectability, poverty and wealth and where such concepts prove hollow. But it is also a fascinating study of a fragile, disintegrating egotist, superbly played by Blanchett, whose desperate graces and darting glances betray a fraying sense of security. Her character's personality revolves around mourning her lost social status and craving its restoration: beyond that, there is little to call a self. Her name is invented, her career non-existent, and her beliefs do not extend beyond amorphous advancement. When she meets Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a diplomat dazzled by the sheen of her self-presentation, she fervently believes that if she can only be shoehorned back into the correct social setting, all will miraculously come right. Can it? If we are incapable of owning up to the past, Allen seems to be saying, we are condemned to flounder in its shadow.