It’s been impossible to escape the hype for Cate Blanchett in Tár, especially if you happen to run in the kind of social media circles I do. The centre of Todd Field’s near three hour meditation on the relationship between art and artist, icon and human, genius and tyrant, Blanchett’s performance as virtuoso conductor Lydia Tár will doubtless cement the character as one of cinema’s great antiheros. But this is not a Cate Blanchett movie. Nor is it a Todd Field movie, despite his having written, produced and directed it. As the full roster of credits that opens the film shows, this movie, like most creative projects on this scale, is the result of the hard work of hundreds. From its first minute, Tár makes clear what is lost by seeing art in terms of icons.
The genre of classical music is an ingenious choice of vehicle for this critique, since it is probably the art form that could most plausibly be argued to have the most ‘purity’ in its product. It is ostensibly devoid of ideology, of human foible, “the closest thing any of us might experience to the divine”. Time and again, Tár insists on this, as in a heated confrontation with a student at Juilliard who raises a timid objection to the prevalence of white male composers in the canon. “You must sublimate your ego,” Blanchett commands, and by extension that of the flawed (usually) men that composed pieces of staggering magnitude. Does it make you feel something? That alone should be testament to its worth, surely. It’s a sympathetic stance, for sure, and one with which I saw many in the audience visibly agree.
Except, of course, Lydia is not so naive as all that. I used the term ‘product’ very deliberately here because our maestro is all too aware that especially nowadays, music, like most creative outputs, exists within an industry, and industry loves nothing more than a brand. Lydia Tár knows her status in her field and revels in it; her ego is fuelled, not sublimated, by her art. Every rehearsal begins with the announcement “I need eyes”, and how true that is. Her clothing might be muted, but every piece is custom-made.
Blanchett’s performance makes it easy to understand how Lydia has managed to hold the world in her hands - hands that direct both on and off the podium. Her control is shown in her tactility, resting her fingers on those of a starstruck woman that flirts with her after a New Yorker interview; throwing a not quite playful air punch at her dissident student; placing a hand on the back of her new cello protégé Olga (Sophie Kauer).
Frequent uncut shots draw focus to her physicality - Blanchett has the kind of charisma that can command a room. She wisecracks, she’s self-deprecating when it suits, but all the while her presence is quietly dominant, even in moments of tenderness with her long term partner Sharon (played with a poignantly resigned dignity by Nina Hoss). Her lunch with Olga is like a grim reverse of Blanchett’s clandestine glove lunch with Rooney Mara in Carol, starkly lit and devoid of warmth as an unsophisticated Olga messily digs into her meal. You can see her nostrils flare when Olga tells her she does not remember the name of a conductor she once played under. There is also a restless need for movement in her that is enhanced by the uncanny placelessness of each setting she occupies. Whether we are in Berlin or New York feels incidental - we are simply in the place that Lydia needs to be right now.
As we progress, however, the chinks in Lydia’s couture armour only get wider. The idea that her perspective might be flawed begins with little corrections - her long-suffering assistant Francesca questions her perspective on Mahler after her interview; Sharon quietly tells her that the music playing in their apartment is at 64 BPM, not 60. Each time, there is a visible bristle; Lydia Tár does not deal well with being wrong. But when evidence of much greater abuses of power surface after a former student and implied lover kills herself, we see this writ large. Lydia is dumbfounded by a situation that, try as she might, she is unable to choreograph to her own ends, and her spiral is both satisfying and haunting, culminating in a violent crescendo that is painful to witness.
Music, like all art, is a human endeavour, and Tár takes pains to tie its music to that humanity. Music calms Sharon’s heart rate, wakes Lydia up; Lydia’s composition takes some of its notation from an alarm outside her apartment. It is influenced by human motivation; the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance would sound completely different (and arguably worse) had Lydia not used her sway to put Olga in the solo seat. The orchestra itself is, by nature, collaborative. Lydia’s demand at Juilliard to separate art from artist might seem reasonable to many at first blush, but Tár knows no art exists in a vacuum. Lydia Tár is brilliant. She is also an abuser. Her abuse informs not only her work, but the work of others, how it sounds and whether or not it is heard. Lydia likes to call her detractors ‘robots’, but to ignore that human context is the truly robotic way of approaching any art form.
But Lydia needs to see herself as superhuman, the music she conducts as detached and rarefied, and it is that mindset that allows celebrated figures to abuse their power and their industry to shield them from critique. It is telling that even amid public protest, there is very little overt condemnation from Lydia’s industry while it can be avoided, only strategies on how to proceed next.
Tár’s treatment of this sort of abuse through Lydia is compelling because its MO is the same as that of its titular character. We are charmed by her. She might threaten a child in the playground, but she was only standing up for her daughter, surely? She might have engineered for new favourite Olga to get the solo, but she was the better player, you all heard it! But she’s female and queer, how could she be abusive?
Because there is a plausible deniability, and because Lydia is not unsympathetic, we are groomed to make excuses until the point it becomes inexcusable. I applaud the film for not becoming some heavy handed critique of ‘cancel culture’, a term that makes my skin crawl and my hackles raise in part because it shows such an ignorance as to who truly wields power in these spaces.
I will say that after more than two hours of near total brilliance, the last 15 minutes were a little bewildering. Not to give too much away, the international detour which closes the film might be attempting to further establish Lydia’s restlessness, or reductiveness in viewing an entire culture merely as a means of escape. But the film participates in the exoticisation a little too much for it to read as critique, and there’s something about the portentousness of the final shot that just made me giggle (cosplay - the lowest form of art, apparently). But if you’re willing to overlook that, I urge you to take Cate Blanchett’s hand and sink into Tár’s dark depths.