Cate Blanchett’s favourite comfort movie
The Academy Award-winning actor Cate Blanchett has long been regarded as one of the finest of her generation. Blanchett’s electrifying and powerful performances, collaborating with the likes of David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Peter Jackson, and Ridley Scott, have spanned time and genres, captivating audiences globally.
Blanchett delivered a phenomenal performance in Woody Allen’s comedy-drama Blue Jasmine, portraying Jasmine, a financially burdened and emotionally vulnerable socialite grappling with the arrest of her extremely wealthy husband. Left penniless, she must rebuild her life with no skills or financial resources.
Equally superb was her role as celebrated musician Lydia Tár in Todd Field’s searing musical drama, Tár. On the verge of recording the symphony that would propel her career, she discovers various factors conspiring against her, essential on the eve of being ‘cancelled’.
Blanchett’s versatility, however, extends beyond profound character studies. She portrayed the formidable supervillain Hela, pitted against Chris Hemsworth’s Thor in the Marvel comic book movie Thor: Ragnarok. She also assumed the role of the elf queen Galadriel in Peter Jackson’s beloved fantasy epic The Lord of The Rings and voiced the spirit animal Spazzatura in Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix animation Pinocchio.
In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Blanchett revealed that her favourite comfort movie is Bi Gan’s meditative and dreamlike odyssey, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. She expressed admiration for the film’s exquisite, painful beauty, blending influences from Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, and Wong Kar-wai. She said: “For me, I’m a huge Tarkovsky fan and an enormous fan of Chantal Akerman and Wong Kar-wai and it’s like he ingested all of those filmmaking reference points and then regurgitated up something of exquisite, painful beauty”.
Blanchett’s affinity for art-house cinema, which challenges conventional Hollywood filmmaking, was evident as she discussed why she finds Bi Gan’s films so arresting. She described Long Day’s Journey Into Night as complex, layered, engrossing, and strangely meditative, offering profound reflections on love, memory, time, and place.
Having been on the Cannes Film Festival jury when the film premiered in 2018, Blanchett emphasised the film’s noir and hallucinogenic qualities. The narrative follows Luo Hongwu, a former casino manager returning to his hometown of Kaili, embarking on a quest to find the woman he once loved.
In conclusion, Blanchett expressed her immersive experience with the film, stating, “You are saying that you watched it, but I actually allow it to wash over me. I think we’re so obsessed in the world in which we live where everything has to make sense, and we grasp hold of a narrative, and [this film] takes away all of those security footholds. It really slows your blood.”
