Writer and director Todd Field returns to cinema after a 16 year filmmaking hiatus with the Cate Blanchett vehicle, TÁR. His new film takes a richly written and utterly captivating protagonist, who demands our artistic admiration, and gradually uncovers the history of her professional misconduct as her cyclical pattern of behavior repeats itself in front of our eyes.
We meet the fictional character of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) perched atop her professional apex mountain. A world-renowned conductor and composer, her growing list of accolades span from being the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic to EGOT status as a composer for the stage and screen. Her book, “Tár on Tár,” is due for an upcoming release, and her complete recordings of Gustav Mahler’s ten symphonies are nearing completion as she prepares for an upcoming presentation of his dauntingly enigmatic “Symphony No. 5.” Tár is untouchable. At least, she believes herself to be indestructible. That is, until the dominoes start falling.
“Some accusations have been made,” and suddenly, the truth behind Tár’s rise to power, and the subtle ways in which she’s since abused that power, begin to materialize like the clues of a mystery coming to light. But unlike most films that investigate a similar fall from grace, Field’s meticulous screenplay chooses to isolate a complete psychological portrait of its central character from any conclusive positioning on the issue it’s exploring, instead furthering the complexities found in the in-between; a “gray area” that remains an ethical neutral-zone. We are then forced to wrestle with our own notions of artistic admiration versus condemnation as we observe from an aesthetic distance. Touching on #MeToo in the era of cancel culture, TÁR serves as a fundamental film examination on detaching the impact and value of a piece of art from the personal life of the artist attached to it, and whether that separation can or even should exist.
At over two hours long, we are given the necessary time to experience the public and private world of Lydia Tár before drawing our own conclusions about her behavior. We see how she presents herself in the public eye during an extended opening interview with the real Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker about her distinctive artistic process and practice — it’s the conductor’s responsibility to interpret the composer’s intent, while discovery is for rehearsal as the performance is for keeping time. We also watch as Tár delivers a Juilliard masterclass that gets heated when a BIPOC student refuses to conduct Bach because of his personal identity politics, resulting in a lambasting from Tár, within the intersection of art and politics, that was captured on another student’s cell phone camera, unbeknownst to her.
“Nowadays, to be accused is the same as being guilty,” Tár is reminded by an older white male colleague. As the film proceeds, we see, with increasing clarity, an inevitability that she continues to ignore despite an underlying cognitive uneasiness that continues to overpower her rational stability. Her sensitivity to sound starts to turn against her, distracting Tár to the point of exasperation, while nightmares from her unraveling past permeate her sleep and cause restlessness in her daily life. While furthering the career of a 19-year-old cellist from Russia to whom she is immediately drawn, Tár’s behavior shifts from covert movement to an open exhibition of supremacy; this rash code of conduct stemming from a false sense of security and impulsive actions that outweigh the thoughts behind or consequences underneath them. Simply put: there are favors for those who comply and dismissal for those who don’t.
As Lydia Tár, Cate Blanchett imbues a mannered physicality and a psychological clarity that heightens the character’s cunning ability to play the game like a chess match of deception or the general of a war strategizing to remain camouflaged. She demonstrates a control of breath and a command of the material that highlights the strengths of the screenwriting. Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who is cleverly referenced in the film, supplements the score with impressive classical gestures of her own, while production designer Marco Bittner Rosser shows a visual juxtaposition in the warmth of the stage lighting hitting the wooden floor of the rehearsal hall as opposed to the coldness of the concrete, brutalist architecture that defines much of Tár’s living environment.
There’s a moment in the film where Lydia Tár sits in stillness in the balcony of the Berliner Philharmonie, an architectural marvel of modernism, and stares in silence at the bare stage and vacant podium which no longer belong to her. “Music is movement,” she is reminded while watching a VHS tape that helped inspire her love of conducting when she was younger. For Lydia Tár, a loss of movement means a loss of life; time stopping in its tracks and ceasing to exist until she takes the podium to restart it once more.
