The scent of a woman

MANILA, Philippines - Cate Blanchett’s Vanity Fair cover profile in February 2009 opens with mysticism that can only be associated with high-caliber performers such as she. “When David Fincher first saw Cate Blanchett play the Virgin Queen a decade ago, he was stunned. “I remember coming out of Elizabeth and thinking, ‘Who is this?!’ the director says. “I didn’t know who she was, but that power from someone in relative obscurity was like seeing her leaping fully realized from the head of Zeus.”

It’s a common reaction when you’ve witnessed such presence as Blanchett’s onscreen. Hers is a powerful rawness that transcends the tired clichés and adjectives that describe the best actresses of her generation. Elizabeth was Blanchett’s golden ticket to Hollywood and she has since built a remarkable career hedging box office hits (and misses) such as the blockbuster The Lord of the Rings trilogy where she played a luminous elf dispensing wisdom and warning, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull where she’s played a villain, and Brad Pitt’s constant as he grows backwards through time in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

If we’re talking about strange cases — one that has led to an Oscar win — Blanchett has one of the most interesting filmographies in Hollywood. Her Academy award-winning turn, as Katherine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, landed her a Best Supporting Actress win. She has since amassed Oscar nominations for her roles in Toddy Haynes’ I’m Not There (where she actually played a version of Bob Dylan) and her return as Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. And if you think she’s just a “serious” actress, she had an uncredited cameo in Edgar Wright’s action/screwball buddy comedy Hot Fuzz, played a loopy reporter in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and provided her voice talent to the forthcoming How to Train Your Dragon 2 and the English version of Ponyo.

This year, Blanchett enjoys another banner year not just because of her reprisal of Lady Galadriel in The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug but also for her another career milestone playing a woman who has fallen into grace in Woody Allen’s acclaimed Blue Jasmine. Since its premiere, the film has been earning praise from critics, mainly for Blanchett’s performance — a first in recent Allen films, which usually have been ensembles (Midnight in Paris and To Rome with Love). And to carry the weight of such a tragic character, a rich Manhattan socialite who slowly made her way into poverty and homelessness, only attests to Blanchett’s capabilities to destroy and rebuild our notions of femininity through.

BLUE JASMINE

David Denby called Blue Jasmine, one of Allen’s strongest films, noting Blanchett’s performance as “the most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career. The actress, like her character, is out on a limb much of the time, but there’s humor in Blanchett’s work, and a touch of self-mockery as well as an eloquent sadness. When she drops her voice to its smoky lower register, we know that she’s teasing the tragic mode. That edge of self-parody keeps us close to her, and we need that closeness, because we’re in for a rough ride.” Often compared to A Streetcar Named Desire, Blue Jasmine emerges as one of this year’s most engaging character studies, mostly thanks to Blanchett. “Thankfully, with Blue Jasmine, it’s (Allen’s) lead character and not his own filmmaking skills that are stuck on repeat, muttering the same traumatic echoes of a complicated, highly publicized history,” Nick McCarthy of Slant magazine notes.

Her ability to portray women of strength and grace makes her the prizewinning candidate to embody something like Giorgio Armani’s Si, a fragrance that captures the ease and the strength of the modern woman. ““Sì is my tribute to modern femininity, an irresistible combination of grace, strength, and independent spirit,” says Armani. And as someone who’s played characters who run the various permutations of femininity — from the resilient grace of Elizabeth I who reigned with resilient might and courage, Marissa Weigler’s elegant fairy-tale villainess in Joe Wright’s Hanna, to Jasmine’s persistent struggle against the forces that drive her down — she perfectly brings to life Sì’s softness and intensity, a fragrance that brims with a rhythmic signature (with its three accords cassis nectar, modern chypre, and light musky wood), giving off a scent that bewitches and mesmerizes.

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Giorgio Armani’s Sì is available in 100ml edp (P6,500) and 50ml edp (P5,000) at Rustan’s Department Stores.