Cate Blanchett Month #1 Seeing Tar

Today I have just seen the 2022 movie, Tar, a film by Tom Field, starring Cate Blanchett. It looks like a work of collaborative genius to me.

IMHO Western Society has become a destructive virtue-signaling tarpit in which men and women cannot be themselves. At the end of “Tar”, the heroine, Lydia Tar, escapes from the West to a country that looks like The Philippines.

I do not know for certain if such a tarpit is what writer/director/producer Tom Field and producer and star Cate Blanchett wanted to show with their brilliant film.

Blanchett gives an astonishing performance as a brilliant, kind conductor and pianist, deeply committed to standards in her art and proud of her place in Western culture, but who loses her career when too many pressures from lesser, narrower PC minds push her too far and she snaps and assaults a man she believes stole her musical score.

This month, on Sunday week, it is Cate Blanchett’s birthday. So I want to pay tribute to this great Australian film maker on my own and with friends.

On Tuesday Week I will be put on trial in Melbourne, Australia, (Blanchett’s birthplace) by police who physically and sexually assaulted me after removing me from prayer with an aboriginal man at St Paul’s Cathedral last year. If I do not lose my freedom at that trial, I will continue to make whatever posts I can this month about things I like and insights I admire about Cate Blanchett and her work.

I might be over simplifying in not giving a lot of credence to allegations against the conductor with respect to a younger, troubled artist who suicides, but allegations like that make me remember the importance of the presumption of innocence more than they push me to automatically, robotically follow the mantra (for some but not me) of “believe the (alleged) victim”.

May all real victims find peace and justice, as Lydia Tar perhaps does onscreen.

Geoff Fox, May 1, 2023, Down Under

The above piece of word art is my words and a border added by me to a photo by Elena Ternovaja and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.