Marin Alsop lashes out at Cate Blanchett’s Tar

The conductor Marin Alsop, who has previously denied any involvement in Tar, excoriates the film  in an interview with Alexandra Coughlin in today’s Sunday Times:

“I first read about it in late August and I was shocked that that was the first I was hearing of it,” Alsop tells me over Zoom from Baltimore, where she has been teaching at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute. “So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”…

“To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking. I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it’s not really about women conductors, is it? It’s about women as leaders in our society. People ask, ‘Can we trust them? Can they function in that role?’ It’s the same questions whether it’s about a CEO or an NBA coach or the head of a police department.

“There are so many men — actual, documented men — 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 antiwoman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before.”

Read on here.