Lydia Tár is a figure of such sufficient social magnitude that you can easily imagine her fitting right into the past 25 years of music history. From the jump we’re told of her array of achievements (an EGOT, a trailblazing philanthropist, and a superstar conductor who has been reshaping the gendered space behind the baton the world over), and this dynamo of a woman presides over it all. Can we have classical music superstars anymore, you ask? The Internet Age loves an exciting and different story, and that suits Tár (the character) and TÁR (the movie) equally. Lydia Tár is ultimately a fictional construct, but with Cate Blanchett inhabiting this part, she feels more real and immediate than most conductors the average person (I include myself in that number) might encounter.
TÁR is about a lot of things, but it’s my guess it will become famous, and infamous, for its perspective on "cancel culture." It is a sly triumph that the film is structured so that regardless of one’s opinion on workplace power dynamics, transactional sexual relationships, making ideological choices regarding supporting problematic artists, or letting certain transgressions slide out of some kind of respect, the viewer will find a voice in the film that echoes their feelings. I welcome the forthcoming deluge of discourse that TÁR will spawn, but I welcome it in the way that entails opening the door and getting out of the way. For a film just under two-and-three-quarter hours, this is propulsive and spry and giant-wine-goblet intense.
Blanchett is a force of nature. This is no surprise. She’s able to take this character, who very honestly in lesser hands could have become schematic, or a caricature built around whatever the needs of the story at any moment might entail, and make her live as both an inspiring artist and a troubled egomaniac. The facts of the whispers that grow louder around Tár as the film progresses are not in dispute, but Blanchett plunges both hands into ambiguity and comes out swinging, letting the viewer come to understand what she’s done in their own time (or at the very least, by just under two hours in).
As Tár’s longtime partner Sharon, Nina Hoss (Phoenix, Barbara) is amazing. That goes without saying, really, as Hoss is one of the finest actors working today in any language. But here, the two women give us a remarkable duet in the way they work together. In all films about long-term relationships that face some form of catastrophic or shocking reevaluation, there is a type of scene, essential to the genre, that I call the “I’ve learned to accept certain things about you” scene. There are countless ways to play this kind of scene, just as there are countless circumstances that lead to it. And here, Hoss distills an entire relationship into six or seven lines, in the most focused and serrated fashion — cultivated and pruned like a bonsai of analysis and diagnosis all at once — and it scorches the very earth. If you play the Oscar game, don’t count Nina Hoss out, because she takes no prisoners here. She is just as good as Blanchett with significantly less screen time.
As things get more insane (the last 20 minutes have some moments that are truly gutsy and hysterical) and the situation careens further out of control to a big old reckoning, being a responsible viewer means you have to ask yourself this question: Should a film dealing with issues of exploitation, murky sexual motivations and suicide be this entertaining? Is it OK that watching a cruel egomaniac get just full-on disassembled by life is kind of ... fun? This is not the kind of movie that you would expect to have a fencing match of a lunch scene between the last Indiana Jones big-bads standing, and yet we have precisely that, with Blanchett and Julian Glover (Quatermass and the Pit!) getting down to some real talk about what happens when conductors can’t keep their batons to themselves
As a film about a catalyzing social issue that aims for visceral immediacy (much of the film happens in November 2022), writer-director Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children) has given us a film to comfortably embody The Now. But there are two instances that strike me as some of the most effective filmmaking choices so far this year, equal parts sleight-of-hand and semiotics (and that’s not even getting into how the fetishization of Deutsche Grammophon graphic design winds through several strands of the film’s story). These are two recurrent visual elements: One is a maze-like spiraled structure that pops up here and there, in books or scribbled in margins or as emotional graffiti. We are never told what it is, but we understand that whenever it occurs, it is of the highest degree of meaning to the characters. Similarly, there is a missing book that comes to occupy a great deal of thematic space as well. These two motifs, the first something physical that unmakes the characters who encounter it, the later an absence that likewise serves the same purpose.
It’s awesome, because Field and his cast find a way to bring the audience into the emotional turmoil of the film without having to explain anything; the viewer constructs the meaning of these things, and they end up defining the whole film, and that’s the kind of thing you used to have pilfer grad-school textbooks to get in on. So besides the fact that it’s an exciting musical drama about taking down corrupt power structures in closed systems, TÁR is going to be a cornerstone of film studies just for taking complicated concepts and turning them into exciting, learn-as-you-go aspects of visual storytelling. The internet is going to explode with takes, so you might as well treat yourself to this remarkable and nasty epic.
