Marin Alsop Calls Award-Winning Film ‘Tár’ Offensive

By Francisco Salazar

Marin Alsop is taking aim at the Golden Globe-nominated film “Tár” in a new interview with Time U.K.

The conductor told the British news source, “I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”

Alsop noted that a lot of the movie had parallels with her life but that she had not heard of the film until August. Upon watching the movie, she called it a “pseudo-reality” and while it was “interesting,” she said it was “slightly dangerous because people may get confused about what’s real and what’s not.”

She added that seeing a woman conductor as an abuser was heartbreaking.

“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.”

Alsop also noted, “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.”

“Tár” tells the story of Lydia Tár, a conductor widely considered one of the greatest and the very first female director of a major German orchestra. The film stars Cate Blanchett who is widely touted as a frontrunner to receive an Oscar nomination and is up for three Golden Globes including Best Picture.

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