Spoilers.
Really loved this. Loved the confidence to open the film with an extended one-on-one interview with the main character to an audience, a move that could easily prove as cataclysimically boring as those events often are. Loved the inverted front-credits — the Avengers could never.
Cate Blanchett dissolves into the character of Lydia Tár, a female trailblazer in a man’s world who not only resents both of those facts but also the question that prompts them. She furiously defends the practise of interpreting an artist through their life and their intent, but seeks to scrub every decision she herself makes down to a purely rational level. This culminates in two cataclysmic mistakes, wherein she seeks to avoid the appearance of impropriety by denying a promotion to her long-suffering assistant at the same time as she contrives an ‘objective’ route to seeing a talented young cellist granted a solo above more senior members of the orchestra.
A fun aspect is that despite everything, neither of these actions is strictly inappropriate: the cellist and the assistant both are talented! Some level of grooming them for success would not be terrible. But Tár lives in fear of others interpreting her in the same way she engages with the great composers, keeping her life so strictly compartmentalised she continues to work in an old apartment that she considers a terrible working environment, full of noise and distraction. She has a great, remote house with her partner and their child that would be better in every way, except that it would mean letting other people in. The compartmentalising isn’t just physical — the worst thing Tár does in the film, though it mostly happens off-screen, is ostracising one of her former mentees who is now stalking her. A partner or a friend would have been able to offer advice that could have helped them both. Instead, Tár becomes implicated in her student’s suicide, and not unfairly.
The film as a whole treads a neat line in keeping Tár sympathetic while not excusing her. She is brash, unpleasant, cruel. She tells terrible easy lies, cheats on her partner, neglects their child. But she excuses all this in herself as she excuses it in her heroes: as incidental to the music. It builds to the beautiful moment where Tár charged Mark Strong’s character on the conducting podium, throwing him to the floor. It’s a completely outlandish moment, ridiculous even within the world the film has established. But you can understand it — despite everything it seems justifiable, and as if the film may have slipped into a universe where she can stand at that plinth and through force of will along inspire the orchestra to play. Tár finally identifies that true note of passion/betrayed that will allow her to conduct the perfect Mahler’s 5th. You really want her to be allowed to continue.
The one part that felt slightly off to me was the sequence where, disgraced and out of Berlin, Tár goes back to what is presumably a childhood home and watches the old tapes of conducting that inspired her — a neat tie back to the cellist — who had the same inspiration but all different, and Blanchett deserves an award just for what her face does when the young prodigy says she doesn’t know who was conducting. As well though, she has a brief interaction with presumably a brother, who has a strong accent and notes that she changed her name from Linda to Lydia (the credits take this one step further and have him credited with the surname “Tarr”). As apropos as it is to Tár’s self-serving mantras about understanding the composer to understand the work, it’s too tempting to take this as the root cause of everything the character is. It goes too far, it’s too cruel, to try and take her name from her like this. For better or for worse — and the character does much that shouldn’t be forgiven — her identity is no facade.
The actual ending strikes a more agreeable note, with Tár shipping out to East Asia and rebuilding, alone, applying her exacting methods to what turns out to be a concert of video game music. The sequence is constructed like a joke, with a punchline, and would be easy to understand as a ironic punishment for the unapologetically snobby maestro — except that she takes it exactly as seriously as she did the (unfortunate) climax of her Mahler sequence in Berlin. There’s no suggestion that she considers this pursuit in any way humiliating or beneath her. She is uncomfortable and unhappy — but that was also true in Berlin. No matter how unacceptable it seems, Tár is content so long as there is music.
I’m currently reviewing Andor, piece by piece. How many reviews of Tár do you think will be written by people currently writing about Andor? Not enough, in my opinion. All links here.
