Jasmine French ou a Blanche Dubois moderna: a reescritura da autodestruição feminina em Woody Allen

Abstract

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is a play by the American playwright Tennessee Williams which tells the story of Blanche Dubois — a southern woman who starts living with her sister and experiences difficulties with her new reality after having lost her aristocratic lifestyle. In the final scene, riddled with illusions, she exists holding the arm of the doctor saying her emblematic phrase “whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” (Williams, 2004, p. 178). Blue Jasmine (2013) is a movie by Woody Allen that its narrative focus is the story of Jasmine French — an upper-class socialite from New York who loses everything and has to move in with her sister in San Francisco. Through a close-up, her tragic ending is on a bench talking to herself. How do these characters connect? This thesis aims to investigate how Woody Allen rewrote Williams’ play by adapting Blanche Dubois’ self-destruction to his character Jasmine French in light of a free and contemporary adaptation perspective. This way, it is investigated how Woody Allen uses techniques such as flashback, music, camera movements and different shots to rebuild and rewrite in his peculiar montage one of the most important plays from the XX century and how such adaptation enriches Tennessee Williams’ critical fortunes. Finally, this research has the objective of corroborating the theoretical perspective that filmic adaptations are translations and that the core of such activity deals with transformation of verbal signs (written texts) into nonverbal signs (movie adaptations), thus creating a completely new text according to André Lefevere’s 1987 concepts on rewriting. The theoretical framework of this research is based on Aristotle (2008), Bazin (1951), Cattrysse (1992; 2014), Metz (1991), Santaella (1983), Stam (2006), Plaza (2013) and others.