Tár
Tarred and feathered
This movie, beautifully written and directed by Todd Field, made me want to jump back to write film reviews after a long, pandemic induced hiatus.
Lydia Tár (a flinty, ferocious Cate Blanchett) is the current head of the Berlin Philharmonic, which means she is one of the most esteemed conductors in the world. The first half hour of the movie takes a stately stroll over what she does for a living. She sits for an interview in public with Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, she has lunch with a fellow conductor (Mark Strong) to talk shop, she goes to fittings for her handmade bespoke suits. At the interview, she pontificates with a godlike self-assurance about creating music. She clips articles about herself (who doesn’t?) and edits her Wikipedia page. She emulates the poses of other conductors in their record sleeves, which puts a bit of a dent in what looks like her supremely confident self. Nothing much happens except it all accrues towards the portrait of an acutely self-aware diva.
At first, the minutiae of her obligations seem a bit pedantic, but Field is carefully building her world, a hermetic place strongly bolted against the incursions of real life by the aura of fame and power she tends to like a meticulous gardener. Life does not intrude on Lydia Tár because she works every minute to keep it at bay. Yet the first image of the film is of a camera phone recording her while she is asleep in a private jet. She is a blur in the background, but in the foreground the video taker is chatting about Tár with someone, exchanging an inside tidbit that portends conflict.
In my view, this is not a movie about the creative process, or about making music. It is the story of how an abuser operates in the world. The audacity of Field’s premise is to see everything exclusively through the vantage point of someone who wields enormous power. If you ever wanted to know what it feels like to be Harvey Weinstein or Charlie Rose, Roger Ailes, Les Moonves, Jeffrey Epstein, Matt Lauer, Bill Cosby, etc… this movie may be your answer.
If you are like Lydia Tár, you spend an enormous amount of time crafting your image and micro managing the perception others have of you, not solely to appease your massive narcissism, but because your image is the fortress against the intrusion of the consequences of the damage you do to others. Unless some self-made calamity succeeds in penetrating this fortress, absolutely nothing touches you. Rumors may abound, but no one dares speak out or confront because you have the power to make people or break them.
Lydia Tár is revered and feared and floats through a very comfortable life honing a careful fiction of herself, but soon fine cracks start appearing in the façade. She has a long-suffering personal assistant (the spectacular Noemie Merlant) who obviously is in love with Lydia and who waits with diminished patience for the acknowledgment she feels she deserves. We do not see anything untoward happen between the two, but it is solely through Merlant’s beseeching, frustrated gaze that we understand that there has been a lot of turbulent water under this bridge. Blanchett may be a shoo in for all the acting awards this year (she conducts, speaks flawless German, and is masterful) but I do hope that the genius in Merlant’s almost silent performance is recognized.
Tár is married to one of the orchestra’s players (the excellent Nina Hoss) who also seems to be in thrall to Tár’s talent and to the good life that Tár has given her, and who silently tolerates her injustices. Everything we learn about Tar’s inner circle seems to point to a pattern of behavior that only her immense fame and power can enable. She exercises a god-like power at lifting people into the spotlight and into her scarce and coveted attention, perhaps in exchange for sexual thrills, and decides, quite arbitrarily, to sink them back into obscurity at a whim. But the crack on the wall appears after testing how much she can push people’s boundaries without them breaking, and it swiftly becomes a chasm. We learn truths about her that make her both more fascinating as a sociopath and more pathetic as a person. Her end comes fast.
Field exercises total subtlety except in one unhinged scene which almost begs disbelief where Tár loses her cool dramatically, and publicly. But it is possible to believe in this outburst as a dam that collapses under the weight of so many lies, so much silent violence, so much artificial propping up of a mirage. Her explosion is directly proportional to the amount of control she required to sustain the whole fake edifice.
The painstaking building of Tár’s world pays off beautifully and so truth is in the details. Seeing her exiled, dragging her own suitcase around on foot (instead of being chauffeured in smoothly silent cars) is enough to show the devastation, although there is more to her spectacular downfall.
Why does it always take so long, when everyone has known about the abuser’s real character for eons? Because people are complicit. Because they wait on bated breath for the abuser’s largesse, because there are vested financial interests, because people have trouble believing that undeniably talented artists who make beautiful things can also be horrible human beings, because power corrupts absolutely.
Tár is a keenly observed portrait of the fragility and insecurity of a world-class abuser. Lydia Tár does not commit any crimes but she destroys people. What is fascinating is why Field chose a woman (a lesbian, attuned to her masculine side) to represent this. Perhaps liberating it from alpha maleness allows the malignancy of the behavior to be in sharper relief, devoid of macho tics and of the cultural tropes that we are used to and have tolerated for way too long. The classical music world is notoriously male dominated; there are very few female conductors. By making the conductor a woman, Tár sheds light into the kind of environment of creative reverence, of individual idolization, that allows someone with such power to run rampant. The more people strive for fame or glory or beauty, the easier it is for abuse to flourish and the easier it is to conceal it. Still, I couldn’t help but wish to see this with a male protagonist. And the kicker is, she is very masculine. She acts like a man.
This is Todd Field’s best film out of only three, including In The Bedroom and Little Children. Exquisitely crafted, intelligently written, beautifully directed and acted, it is a bit of a difficult but rewarding gem.
