Thursday, August 8, 2013

Coda: Blue Jasmine's Bird of Paradise

Yes, all the excitement and raves, to this viewer, are right on target. Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine is engrossing; Cate Blanchett's performance, while mannered, is riveting. During one scene, when Jasmine moves through the San Francisco apartment of her sister (charmingly and passionately played by the excellent Sally Hawkins), I experienced a sharp shpilkes in my connectigazoid..actually, My Better Half was elbowing me. A background prop, there I suppose to show her sister's declasse sensibility, is a piece of Do It Yourself art work of a Bird of Paradise or the like, and visible at 32 seconds into the above trailer, that MBH had assembled when she was 8 years old. Whether mindful of a particularly memorable, if difficult, period in her family history, she, and we have always kept this in our home. Relegated in recent years to our basement/laundry room area, after it's appearance in Blue Jasmine, natch, it took on a new resonance and, of course, a heightened sense of irony, so we brought it up to our parlor floor, where we are looking for a place to mount it. A photo of our heirloom appears below: 


Birds of Paradise by Judith Tantleff-Napoli, at the time age 8

 Tempus fugit, ars longa...



1 comment:

  1. I too had a deeply nostalgic moment when I saw the DIY bird picture on the wall in Blue Jasmine. That picture hung on my Grandfather's wall for many years, a gift from my mother, both now long deceased. I didn't even know I had forgotten it until I saw it again in this movie. Thank you for posting a picture of it to share with my family - it reminds me of happy, warm, simple times from my childhood. I am on the other side of the world (Perth, Western Australia), but I share the memory of this handcrafted, wonderful, tacky, bizarre piece of craft. I would desperately know where I can find one of my own!

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