Camilo, Tár, a double rant

My old friend Camilo has had a couple of back surgeries and is not in as much pain as he was the last time I saw him, though he struggles to regain his flexibility, and he’s moving slowly. He very generously brought an Indian take-out lunch to my place, and as always we had wide-ranging talk: climate catastrophe, politics, racism, Buddhism, the elections, and state violence. We ranted in harmony about Tár. Written by a straight man and performed by a straight woman, the central character is supposed to be a lesbian who uses her power to seduce, abuse, dominate, and wreck young women. 

We both hated it. It’s a stereotype as old the 1950s. The Pit of Loneliness, The Killing of Sister George, more recently Queen Anne (which I also hated, as I did my PhD on the Queen Anne era, and I knew how utterly wrong the emotional dynamics were). 

Camilo ranted, “It must have been modeled on the Greek idea of tragedy, a great man falls from grace because of a character flaw, but you have to like the man for that to work. This woman was never likable. She’s a mean bitch and a racist, and [spoiler alert] there’s something satisfying in seeing her decline. She’s a female Weinstein. As if any woman with that kind of power would behave like a Weinstein. It’s basically a woman-hating movie.”

We laughed at the scene in which she violates the principles of a blind audition, the scene in which, in front of a Berlin orchestra and her wife, she touches the face of the young woman who just auditioned. Outrageous. For a woman who is supposedly brilliant and gifted, she seems incredibly stupid, chasing her young crush into an abandoned dark basement. Almost as nuts as the spoof on Scream.

If, like Camilo and me, you fell victim to the hype and spent money on a ticket, cleanse your palate by watching a real lesbian orchestral conductor (her name is even mentioned in Blanchett’s endless opening monologue) Nathalie Stutzmann. Brains, ability, ethics: she has it all. And she not only conducts, she sings while conducting. The real thing makes Tár look as absurd as it is. Stutzmann is now the music director  of the Atlanta Symphony.