In TÁR, we meet an orchestra conductor of such esteemed stature that the entire world appears to obey the bounce of her baton.
Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), maestro of the Berlin Philharmonic, stands at the height of an illustrious career, one that even includes achieving the EGOT (winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award). She travels the world with her assistant, an aspiring conductor (Noemie Merlant), collecting honors and promoting her new book, Tár on Tár. At home, she lives in a vast, concrete space with her violinist wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) and their young daughter (Mila Bogojevic). All of this is maintained with the precision of a metronome. But no human being can truly be that precise.
Muted, mature, and very very smart, TÁR ruminates on a wide range of things—the meaning of music; separating the art from the artist; cancel culture; marriage—but it does so through the lens of a very particular person. As such, writer-director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children) sets the stage for Blanchett to deliver what might be her defining performance. Lydia Tár is the quintessential Blanchett character: imposingly regal, too perfect to be true, but only because she’s clenching her world so tightly that it soon begins to crack.
Early on, during a laudatory New Yorker interview before a live audience, Lydia declares that conducting is mostly about “keeping time,” which “is no small thing.” Indeed, she sees herself as the head of a marching band, leading not only her musicians but also her audiences toward musical nirvana, one perfectly placed step at a time. (If someone can’t keep the tempo and falls behind, oh well.) In a master class at Juilliard, she tells a student of color who has expressed reticence about revering the white male masters of the past that, as a conductor, you must “sublimate yourself—your ego and, yes, your identity.” She thinks she has sublimated herself to the composers whose music she conducts, but in turn she demands that everyone in her life sublimate themselves to her. And that’s where the fissures begin.
Thinking back on Blanchett’s career, she’s played plenty of vulnerable women, but rarely openly, willingly vulnerable ones. In a masochistic way, a Blanchett character usually demands to be broken. Lydia Tár can’t even conceive of herself as being weak, which is why the conductor’s podium is where she fully comes alive: in command, exuding strength and assurance, conducting not just the instruments but time itself. Later in the film—after leaked footage of her comments at the master class go viral, alongside other fomenting scandals—she suffers a symbolic fall while running up some stairs and suffers a severe scrape on her face. When she returns to the podium, bruised and battered, she conducts more ferociously than ever, attempting to reassert her dominance.
Like In the Bedroom and Little Children, TÁR is intricately, but not showily, constructed. Field’s camera is always where it needs to be, particularly attentive to giving Blanchett the space she needs. (Her soliloquy during that master class, mostly captured in a single take, is a showstopper.) Sound, perhaps predictably, proves to be Field’s most crucial tool—not only the muscular use of the likes of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 and Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, but also the recurring motif of Lydia being bedeviled by mysterious noises (some of which recall the sonic puzzle at the heart of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton). Chimes emanating from a neighboring flat; the midnight hum of her refrigerator; a woman’s scream off in the woods while Lydia is out for a run—each instance is an auditory thorn pushing further and further under Lydia’s skin.
Amidst all the controlled artistry on display in TÁR, it must be acknowledged that as much as the movie seeks to skewer the pretensions of Lydia and her world (beginning with her flamboyant stage name, pronounced “tar”), it also exhibits its own indulgences. There is the nearly three-hour running time, for one thing, inflated with lengthy dinner conversations about various philosophers and composers. And the ending feels self-satisfied and arch, especially compared to the sincerity the movie otherwise evokes. The final scene turns on a reveal that is undeniably funny, a clever turning of the screw, but it’s also too bitter, too biting, and too vindictive for a film that has immersed us so fully in one woman’s wayward life. TÁR loves its main character too much, despite her considerable failings, to leave her in a place so smug.
(10/12/2022)