Cate Blanchett’s ‘Tár’ Puts Mahler in the Spotlight
Just in case the world didn’t recognize that Austrian composer Richard Strauss was a modern-day Mahler, at least in spirit, Cate Blanchett did when she made her big-screen debut in “Tropical Malady.”
In that role, she plays Strauss’s wife Celie, and she makes a good impression as a woman of many talents, one who is the one in control while the husband and the husband’s music take the spotlight. (A similar situation occurs in the movie “Blue Jasmine,” when Julia Roberts stars as a woman whose talents are in the control of a man, David Schwimmer, and is one of his primary inspirations. When Julia Roberts makes an appearance, it is almost always in the director’s chair doing the film’s directing while Schwimmer stars as the main star.)
Of course, the movie “Tropical Malady” is also about its actors’ sex lives, and here Blanchett’s Celie is a woman of great sensibility who takes pleasure in celibacy.
The movie also gives her a woman of great sensibility to play as a woman of great sensibility who takes pleasure in celibacy, and Blanchett’s Celie is in total control of the sexual escapades within her home. It is a powerful moment, in a movie that also gives Blanchett a moment to be in control, too, when she is at a dinner party where her mother and the other women sit at the table, and Celie has a chance to be in charge again.
Cate Blanchett, in a short interview with The Times Magazine, said the movie was “a real surprise when I was doing it. I really had no idea what the movie was going to do. What I was thinking is