“Tár” - Todd Field and Cate Blanchett score a masterpiece
Lydia Tár is one of the most fascinating characters to grace the screen. A great pianist, conductor, ethnomusicologist, composer…and so fully realized, you could be forgiven for thinking that the film that carries her name is a biopic of a living person.
“Tár” is a masterwork and as such, goes beyond being merely a film of its time. Sure, it is on the surface, tangentially related to the moment of so-called “cancel culture”, but it is very much a study in pride, arrogance, ego, and by extension, what lies behind those qualities. Lydia is perhaps the greatest living conductor, an instructor at Juilliard, conductor for a/the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, a writer whose most recent work will be a memoir, and as she calls herself, “a U-Haul” lesbian with a wife and child.
She is also, at any given time, the smartest persons in the room. She has her mentor whom she confides in, a loyal personal assistant whom she seems to regard as a three dimensional Alexa or Suri, and has had a number of lovers on the side, one of whom has recently committed suicide.
Krista Taylor is introduced early on and then vanishes, only to be mentioned upon discovery of her decease. She was obviously cast off by the great woman and is only the most fatal and tragic of people Lydia disposes of without thought.
It is hardly enough to focus on one facet of Lydia’s character, but in keeping with the film’s theme of how great artists seem to discard from their lives those who are not, her humility in serving the conductor, the music, vanishes in the presence of other human beings.
Lydia does have a commanding presence, but we see that she keeps her eyes open to her immediate surroundings like any good predator. She has acute and astute hearing, sleeping little at night, hearing tones from elsewhere in the apartment building (and then composing a piece around them), but she is also a willful dinosaur, of sorts. A protégé of Leonard Bernstein’s, she follows in his footsteps in recording all of Mahler’s symphonies and we are introduced to her as she is recording the Fifth Symphony.
Lydia is a complicated woman. She is willing to give lip-service the women conductors who came before her, but is sanguine in voicing any political stance any further than that the classical world has come a long way. Her interview with Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker Magazine is a tour de force of someone who knows her press and how to play the audience. And yet.
And yet, she is not universally loved. An opening shot shows her asleep on a private plane being captured by a cellphone with a fairly snarky text thread going on about her. We assume that it is her assistant Francesca’s phone and there will be another such shot later in the film.
She digs into a student conductor at Juilliard who says he cannot play or even listen to Bach because of Bach’s heteronormative, white, and prodigious siring of 20 children conflicting with his own BIPOC identity. Lydia cajoles the young man into listening to a Bach partita as a call and response, as a dialog, as an interrogation. It seems she might have even won him over and then she continues to harangue him about hanging onto identity politics and savages him for, well, just being who he is. As he picks up his things to go, he says, “you’re a fucking bitch.” It is hard to disagree with that assessment.
But Lydia is supremely charming, disarmingly eloquent, and frighteningly intelligent. She is persuasive and if there is pushback to her ideas, she finds ways to get around the pushback by hurting others, perhaps unknowingly, but not necessarily unwittingly. Despite what she says later in the film, relationships for her are transactional.
She maintains a separate apartment for her liaisons, no doubt as part of a pact with her wife Sharon, perhaps a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach. Sharon is also the first violinist and concertmaster of the orchestra and can read Lydia better than many. When a new, young cellist applies to join the orchestra, Lydia - who has patently fallen for her, positions the Olga to perform an Elgar concerto as the companion piece to the Mahler on the recording. Doing so, she passes over the current lead cello and pursues Olga with no idea that the rest of the group sees pretty plainly what is transpiring.
Lydia, however, seems incapable of grasping the consequences of her actions. In the middle section of the film, she “rotates out” Sebastian, the assistant conductor from his position and this leads Francesca, her assistant to hope that she might be replacing him, until Lydia says she’s not ready but is welcome to apply for the position. There is a deposition surrounding her relationship with Krista Taylor that swiftly blows up across social media and into the music world. The revelation of what happened to Krista is the last straw for Sharon and we see Lydia now obviously removed from the orchestra, leaving Berlin, and returning to her family’s home in New Jersey where her brother barely acknowledges her. “Tony?” “Oh, hi Linda, or Lydia…” He doesn’t make a big show of it, but we see that “Lydia” is a persona built over time, by a girl from a working-class family, to become this international star before us. To his point, she doesn’t have a clue where she’s going, though.
That the film ends in a wry and nearly surreal place, is only fitting. When you’ve destroyed everything you’ve built and the goodwill and trust that comes with it, where do you go? Another question is what have you learned?
The irony throughout the film would be hard to miss, but for someone with acutely sensitive and well-trained hearing, Lydia does not listen. She does not hear others. In some ways, the arrogance seems almost like a posturing as opposed to a genuine character trait. She literally doesn’t hear nor does she want to hear the dissolution of everything around here. If she did hear it, she would….be a different character.
There is a tragedy in watching people inflict pain on others from hubris and ignorance; in this case, we are charmed enough by Lydia to feel something similar for her, even. She is outed by a video online, she is undone by her Krista Taylor affair, and she is brought low, perhaps by machinations by either Francesca or Sharon or perhaps both.
About Cate Blanchett, nothing more need be said. Out of a lifetime of consummate performances, this is, as one critic put it, her “Raging Bull”. It’s not enough to say that she disappeared into the role. That is far too trite. That she learned piano, how to conduct, and speak German, for the role is not so unusual. That she does all these things well and makes them seem primary to her, is remarkable. I could go on and on and on, but it is simply unnecessary. This is a defining role in a career full of them; but this one is special. That’s all.
Everyone is fantastic in this film. From Nina Hoss who plays Sharon (the most grounded person in the work), to Noémie Merlant as Francesca and onto Mark Strong as a donor and amateur conductor, each figure reads as a well-rounded, fully formed individual.
It’s all there in the writing. And the directing. After an absence of sixteen years, Todd Field has returned with a masterpiece worthy of Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and the rest of that elite pantheon. It is a work of staggering depth, nuance, and sensitivity.
The film starts with the end credits, as if to say, “fine, you’re going to see an ensemble of outstanding performances and a lead of immense grace and depth, but this didn’t come about through the actors and the director alone”. Putting the grips, the ADR techs, and everyone else first is the equivalent to reading all the names of the orchestra. You sense, as perhaps Lydia does not, that it takes more than one pair of hands to bring a work to life.
Florian Hoffmeister’s cinematography is a series of pans, wide shots, and expert framing. The color balance is what might strike people first; the visuals are as calibrated as Lydia’s persona but of course, the camera sees more. We only half-know specifics, but it’s stunning that we are more aware of what Lydia is doing than she herself.
Lastly, the music. I found myself getting lost in Mahler, Elgar and others and as one might suspect, the music is not so much about calculating feelings as it is a descriptor of what is before us. It is also lush and occasionally, so full that I felt like my heart might burst.
There is so much more to be said about “Tár”, but I think I want to keep it closer inside for now. Maybe, I’ll do a follow-up. There are films that stay with you long after you have seen them. They continue to inform your thoughts, your reflections, for quite a while afterward.
Part of me wants to go into greater detail about her daughter and how that is the only relationship untainted by Lydia’s monomania. Or to really look into the themes of accountability and responsibility. Or of not dodging those responsibilities (or the flouting of them) with an inflated ego which may just be masking the fear of being found out. Or being found out as that girl from a New Jersey working-class family. There are ores of meaning to be mined. To say that “Tár” rewards repeat watching is an understatement. Watch, listen, learn, and love.
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