Female Conductor Referenced in ‘TAR’ Slams Film as ‘Anti-Woman’ for Making Lead Character an Abuser

Just in time for the start of voting for this year’s Academy Award nominees (beginning this Thursday), a world famous real-life conductor has come out against “TÁR” and its tortured protagonist.

Marin Alsop, music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, is mentioned early on in the Cate Blanchett-starring picture as an example given by the protagonist of how gender bias isn’t an overstated problem in the world of professional music. But as explained in an interview with The Sunday Times, she thinks the film itself might contribute to the problem. Upon seeing the Todd Field-directed drama, she says, “I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”

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“To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking,” Alsop said. “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.”

Alsop is the first female conductor to win the Koussevitzky Prize and is also a MacArthur Fellowship recipient.

Blanchett herself noted in an interview with Indiewire that “I was so daunted by the ask of it — not just what was necessary to play the character, but also the depth of questioning in the screenplay and my relationship to it, which kept shifting depending on which scene we were shooting or which relationship we were focused on that day.”

Alsop, who starred in feature documentary “The Conductor,” continued, “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 anti-woman. 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.”

Field, who wrote the screenplay specifically for Blanchett, noted that “If you really want to talk about power and the long reach of history — the abuse and complicity of power, how it corrupts, all these clichés we’ve grown up with — you have to reckon with the idea that there is no black or white. To find the truth of something requires a little more rigor.”

Field’s upcoming short film “The Fundraiser,” which is set in the world of “TÁR,” which will debut at at next month’s Berlin Film Festival.

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