Lydia Tár. She is one of the great modern composers. A protege of Leonard Bernstein, scholar of Gustav Mahler. She has led symphonies in Boston, New York, and most recently been made the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. She is also an EGOT, a celebrated author on music theory, perhaps even a modern gay icon, and she is entirely a fictional character. But for two and a half hours you completely forget that last point -so well does writer-director Todd Field immerse you in this world where Tár is a name on par with André Previn or Philip Glass.
His movie Tár depicts this imagined figure of great notoriety in the world of professional music and the steady downfall of her career to controversy amidst a highly anticipated orchestral performance. A grand antihero story of a kind not often afforded to women, it stars Cate Blanchett as the titular musical titan in a performance that is nothing short of extraordinary. This is a movie for people who love the nuances of acting, of becoming a character - which Blanchett does fully here in all of Tár’s compelling, contradictory dimensions. Of all the movies I’ve seen this year only Decision to Leave has been as transfixing a watch.
Case in point, the movie begins with an interview at what seems to be the Lincoln Center conducted by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik that runs for almost fifteen minutes, and yet it is mesmerizing. Just about everything necessary to understanding Lydia’s personality comes out of this conversation on music and influence and personal philosophy. The subtle details in Blanchett’s physical performance: her eyes, her hands, her tone of voice speaks immensely to this characters’ identity and her ego -her authentic off-the-cuff attitude to the questions is like an acting masterclass. And Lydia actually follows up this scene delivering one of her own, a guest lecture at the Julliard Conservatory where she rather pointedly and aggressively critiques a students’ disinterest in Bach over matters of racial and sexual politics -an early indicator of the stubborn blind spots in her own power and privilege that would come back with a menace later.
In Berlin, Lydia has a wife Sharon (Nina Hoss), also her concertmaster, and a young daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who experiences bullying at school, which Lydia deals with by quietly threatening her bully. And as we see her assemble and reconstruct her orchestra for the first time since COVID in preparation for a much anticipated live recording of Mahler’s 5th Symphony, it is apparent she has a few more highly troubling toxic traits coming to the fore.
Tár marks a grand return for Todd Field, a critical darling of a filmmaker who has gone sixteen years since his last movie, Little Children. In that time, not only has he not missed a beat in his directing acumen, but he has been carefully attentive to the changing worlds of celebrity and social media. He opens the movie with a shot of a series of text messages on a phone filming something in the background, and returns to this visual motif a few times. Each time it is unsettling, borderline voyeuristic, and hits home one of the central themes: that Lydia’s life is not private. Much of the movie is spent within her world: her home, her company at the Philharmonic –when public scrutiny falls on her she endeavours to shut it out, insulate herself within her own field of power and control. But her ego cannot abide this forever. And all the while we see her perpetuating the dangerous pattern that results in this attention.
Field is very good at framing the objective within the subjective. Lydia is the constant focus, her point-of-view given singular voice, and yet the world overwhelms her. She is often dwarfed by large vacant spaces, the film maintaining a distance from her and her thoughts. Occasionally in this vacuum we see her assistant Francesca, played luminously by Noémie Merlant, and see her in a lens that Lydia is incapable of. It is clear that Lydia doesn’t value Francesca for everything she does, and that Francesca’s emotional attachment to her mentor is undergoing a crisis. Lydia can register this on some level, but does not respond responsibly in light of her preoccupations with the symphony, with her daughter, with shifts in the make-up of her orchestra, consequently with a young cellist who has caught her attention –and perhaps most importantly, with keeping down her connections to a former pupil who has committed suicide.
Blanchett plays tightly Lydia’s feelings on all of these matters. Her personal expression, her conscientiousness comes out so rarely, repressed by the control she must hold over any situation. And yet the cracks are clear. But even as her vulnerabilities gradually see light, she almost frighteningly occupies that head space of a figure entrenched by their toxicity, by their reputation as a public figure. Though Lydia isn’t open about it, Blanchett conveys subtly the processes that allow her to rationalize her attitude and actions. We recognize the sly way she is with new ‘favourite’ Olga (Sophie Kauer), whom she contrives to flatter. A more potent glimpse into an abuser’s point-of-view hasn’t been seen in a movie that I can recently recall.
It is riveting to watch Blanchett master that discomfort, to see her revel in the other unsavory facets of Lydia’s character that coalesce into this provocative image. There’s her palpable discomfort with her working-class immigrant neighbours any time they ask for something. Early on she suggests to a businessman conductor played by Mark Strong who runs her fellowship program for aspiring women composers, that it be opened up to men. And then there are those touches of condescension that colour about her every conversation, even to a degree with Sharon, who is extraordinarily patient, and Petra, whom even as the one person it is implied she genuinely is attached to, she can’t help but correct in her playtime symphony with several toy conductors –“an orchestra’s not a democracy,” she says. She is an elite and unashamed of it, someone who started her career as a ground-breaker but has more recently resigned herself contentedly to the old boys’ club. And yet there is something sympathetic, or at least pitiable there. Blanchett’s small touches are maybe the most important, the calculated way she carries herself as a woman of confidence but also who is posturing. Long before we get a glimpse of her real backstory, it is apparent in quite subtle ways that Lydia Tár is in part an act -a persona masking insecurity. Most vividly it’s hinted at through recurring paranoid hauntings, Lydia being awakened at night by a sound she searches for the source of. Sometimes it is the ticking of a metronome, other times a distant scream. And on occasion, more opaquely are there nightmare flashes altogether direct in their allusion to that traumatizing relationship, newly unearthed and consequential.
Field builds to his final act with precise elegance -the movie is long but its’ pacing utterly critical -the breadth of those first two sequences mean a lot for what comes later, when Field addresses the issue head on in a way that might appear neutral for its’ relative muting of drama. The actual undoing of Lydia Tár is told through a lot of ellipses, and again her perspective is heard where others are silent. But it is precisely in that where she is most adamantly condemned. This is the “cancel culture” movie that understands the fiction and insidiousness behind that concept -Lydia tries various excuses that have been heard countless times by public figures attempting to eschew accountability. All the while it couldn’t be more clear: only she is responsible for her fall from grace. And she cements it in a climax so raw, unflinching, and powerful that Blanchett could win the Oscar off of it alone.
The movie ends on a note that is bizarre and perfectly tragicomic -a glimpse at where the career of the great Lydia Tár has been consigned. I won’t give it away, but it reminds me amusingly of the fate of John Lasseter. Yet still she is conducting music, and still the music is terrific. Most of the music we hear in the film was led by her (literally, Blanchett conducted it all herself!), and it is magnificent -paired well with Field’s stirring direction of such sequences in which all focus is on the towering force of Tár presiding over her orchestra, making magic with it. This is a figure imbued in any scenario, in any circumstance with considerable gravity, reflected by the music she creates. Tár truly is an epic of a character study, among the most fulfilling in ages.
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