Timothée Chalamet has made a career out of playing guileless young men who are heading for a fall. And so with a delicious dash of irony, a callow comment about opera and ballet has prompted the mother of all backlashes.
Talking to fellow actor Matthew McConaughey at the University of Texas about the need to preserve cinema as an art form, the 30-year-old said: “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this anymore.’”
Professional ire was, of course, inevitable, with both New York’s Metropolitan and the Royal Ballet and Opera responding to Chalamet’s glib comment. What a philistine, I hear you say. How dare this arrogant little squirt damn industries of which he knows little.
But rather than us all rolling over melodramatically like so many dying swans, can we not focus on the positive? Chalamet in all his youthful arrogance has actually done the opera and dance industries a jolly big favour.
The obvious point to make is that Chalamet, perhaps the biggest actor in the world, has suddenly made these art forms which often struggle for exposure, very big news. For the young opera or ballet novice, for those who thought that Jonas Kaufmann was a striker for Bayern Munich, they may now have the curiosity to delve into worlds they have never considered.
And if you live in Seattle or Hawaii or Pittsburgh or Chicago, fill your boots. Opera companies in these locations are offering discounted tickets. Pittsburgh Opera announced a 30 per cent discount which read: “No one likes the school bully! Get 30 per cent off tix tomorrow in honor of TIMMI.” Unwittingly, the skinny brat may have started a mania.
Of course, I am a little bit disappointed in Chalamet – not least because he has a name that wouldn’t look out of place in the corps de ballet at the Palais Garnier. He even alluded to great dancers and choreographers when preparing for his Oscar-nominated performance in Marty Supreme. When playing the table-tennis prodigy, he aimed for the “physicality of a George Balanchine or Mikhail Baryshnikov”. If Jason Statham stated that Sergei Diaghilev influenced his role in The Beekeeper, I missed it. Chalamet also comes from a family who knows how tough life in the high arts really is. His mother, Nicole Flender, trained as a ballet dancer before appearing on Broadway in musicals such as Hello, Dolly!.
Chalamet’s background is a reminder that the arts are porous. There is no doubt that his mother was an influence on her son, and indeed Flender has said that she “planted seeds” in terms of creative inspiration.
We should also remember that different art forms have always informed each other. Opera and ballet have long been an influence on cinema. One of the early pioneers of film, Georges Méliès, produced silent works about opera in the hope that it would boost the fledgling cinema industry. Meanwhile, some of the great works of mid-20th century cinema – The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann – take their cue from the visual abstract beauty of dance. Of course, opera can be abstract too, but it also provides a dramatic narrative shape that cinema has long pilfered. If you watch Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, with all its ritualistic violence and over-the-top emotion, and don’t think of Verdi, then you are clearly not trying hard enough.
We know in this internet age that anything that isn’t pornography or kittens is likely to be labelled niche, and that the world of arts and entertainment suffers from the same such effects. Only big films, big pop stars, big TV shows will be searched with any considerable volume, and so great work, great talents – particularly in the high arts – can disappear without trace in a way that would not have happened even 20 years ago. The result, of course, is a big amorphous blob from which only the visages of Kim Kardashian and Jacob Elordi are visible.
I realise that somewhere a highbrow army is being galvanised, with their aim to put Chalamet in a dark room and make him watch George Benjamin’s Written on Skin on a loop for six months. But actually they should cut him some slack. He has elicited a conversation which proves that, when it comes to opera and ballet, people do really care.