Just in time for the start of voting for this year’s Academy Award nominees (starting this Thursday), a world-famous real-life conductor has come out against “TÁR” and his tortured protagonist.
Marin Alsop, Music Director Laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Principal Conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, is mentioned at the beginning of the image starring Cate Blanchett as an example given by the protagonist of how gender bias does not it’s an exaggerated problem in the world of professional music. But as she explained in an interview with sunday times, she believes that the film itself could contribute to the problem. Watching the Todd Field-directed drama, she says, “I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a director, I was offended as a lesbian.”
“To have the opportunity to play a woman in that role and make her an abuser, it was heartbreaking for me,” Alsop said. “I think all women and all feminists should be upset about that kind of portrayal because it’s not really about female conductors, is it? It is about women as leaders in our society. People ask: ‘Can we trust them? Can you play that role?’ It’s the same questions whether you’re a CEO, an NBA coach or the head of a police department.”
Alsop is the first female conductor to win the Koussevitzky Prize and is also the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.
Blanchett herself noted in an interview with Indiewire that “I was so intimidated by the question, not only what was necessary to play the character, but also the depth of the questioning in the script and my relationship with it, that it kept changing depending on the scene we were shooting or the relationship we were focused on. that day”.
Alsop, who starred in the documentary “The Conductor,” continued: “There are so many men, documented real men, that this film could have been based on, but instead it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes. of those men. That feels anti-woman. To assume that women will behave identically to men or go hysterical, crazy, crazy is perpetuating something we’ve seen in movies so many times before.”
Field, who wrote the script specifically for Blanchett, noted that “if you really want to talk about the power and the long reach of history, the abuse and complicity of power, how it corrupts, all these clichés that we’ve grown up with, you have to have it.” “You have to reckon with the idea that there is no black or white. Finding the truth of something requires a little more rigor.”
Field’s next short film, “The Fundraiser,” which is set in the world of “TÁR,” will premiere at next month’s Berlin Film Festival.
