Venice: Todd Field director Todd Field returns to the screens with one of the most exciting new American films in years.
“TÁR” is so much more than the great American movie about “abolition of culture” - a phrase that insults it with every move - but this dense, awkward image of a maestro’s fall from grace also requires it to be seen through that unique lens from its very first shot. Todd Field’s thriller and devious third seizes the electrifying fence of digital-age discourse with both hands and dares us to stick it out for 158 minutes in hopes that we’ll finally start to feel like we’re shocking ourselves.
“TÁR” is a provocation full of slow punches and drier laughs (even its featured title is intentionally a pretentious joke) yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in their care. This feels like a solid needle for a movie so targeted that it opens with a long, long scene of its subject on stage for a illustrative conversation with The New Yorker Adam Gopnik, who needs no introduction.
But Maestro’s first “Little Kids” movie in 16 years—and the only original screenplay he’s ever directed—wasn’t quite the sarcasm you might imagine if someone just told you where the final scene takes place. On the contrary, Field returns to us with a character study that is brutal but very honest and equipped with a million shades of gray. TÁR tells the story of a pioneering woman whose ambition to embody the greatness of the past makes her vulnerable to the unique perils of the present. The movie is amazing and wonderful as it is.
“TÁR” prides itself on the sweeping and frustrating allure of a project that Field has been working on since the day he fell out of the spotlight more than a decade ago, yet it tells a story that could only have shaped during the last stretch of his absence. Fearless in a way that allows its heroine to seem unaware of what she is supposed to be afraid of, this is the kind of movie that only someone who has been watching the world burning from the sidelines can make for so long - long enough that he sees no reason why he shouldn’t play with fire himself, and from a distance It allows him to focus his attention directly on the nature of what feeds it.
“TÁR” will probably gross $57 at the box office (give or take), but whoever buys a ticket will be inspired to destroy their German orchestra from the inside out, or at least write an idea of why. Let’s not hold that against one of the most daring and exciting new American films I’ve seen in years.
In the footsteps of creative giants like Scott Rudin and Tracy Jordan, Lydia Tarr is one of the only living people to win an EGOT award. Of course, whatever prizes may crowd the shelf of the brutal apartment Lydia shares with her partner/concert director Sharon (Nina Hoss) and their Syrian adopted daughter in Berlin, they’re just signs of progress on the New York-born conductor’s path toward the kind of immortality preserved for the legends of her field.
Legends like Gustav Mahler, whose Fifth Symphony will soon be recording Lydia with the German orchestra she has led for the past seven years, cemented her legacy as the greatest conductor of her time. Leonard Bernstein, who taught Lydia everything he knew about timekeeping and challenging time. Johann Sebastian Bach, a button-demanding idiot, whose music continues despite the fact that it has become a symbol of the exclusionary whiteness of the classical world.
We note that Lydia’s protagonists are all men, while she describes herself as a “U-Haul lesbian” who suits herself in the style of Céline Sciamma (apparently), and gently robs her enemies of one of her sharp cheekbones, refusing to make a “scene” Gendered by her well-deserved success as the world’s first and only conductor of a major orchestra. We can only imagine how smart a woman like Lydia would be to fly so close to the sky - or what she had to do to stay there for so long - but “TÁR” will depict in detail what the world might look like to someone who can’t see beyond the sun in their eyes.
Blanchett makes the great 21st century Icarus. Arming her unrivaled charisma away from art and toward instead predatory self-preservation, the “Carol” star commands the film’s long, uninterrupted scenes as if she were managing them on her own; As Lydia gradually loses her ability to adjust the rhythm of the world around her, “TÁR” finds sickening pleasure in the dissonance between the surging character and the actor who perfectly controls your instrument.
“tar”
Focus Features
We’ve seen Blanchett play women on the verge of a nervous breakdown before, but she hasn’t erased herself on screen with such concussive force. The controlled demolition of the performance you present here provides a more nuanced (and cautiously sympathetic) explanation of the social dynamics behind the #MeToo movement than any male actor or character could. Thanks to Blanchett, “TÁR” has been able to live up to the outdated and useless model Separating art from artist In the deep picture of an artist detaching from herself.
Lydia is a tough and tough character and her flesh is perhaps closer to shark cartilage than skin, but the strength of her genius is marred by the genius of her strength, and we can only be surprised by how earnestly she believes that each of these things is required to complete the other - working synchronously like a clock, or a hand connector with similar accuracy. In fact, identifying it as a conscious belief is not entirely correct; It would be more accurate to describe Lydia’s mindset as a side effect of the system that has enshrined her success. The system that enforces the same hierarchy of Lydia’s fame seems to be broken, and the system that convinced her that she could only assert her position by abusing it at every opportunity.
Needless to say, this does not bode well for the fellowship created by Linda and investment banker/conductor Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong) to support female musicians in the classical music community. One of these young musicians—a violinist in his twenties named Christa Taylor—appears to have had a particularly traumatic experience under Lydia’s intimate tutelage, and the conductor is haunted by vague pleas for attention that Lydia doesn’t want to hear (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” Nami Merlant plays Lydia’s full-time assistant and part-time partner, feeding her boss tiny white pills and silencing her victims in exchange for the orchestra promotion she tacitly promised).
Lydia protects herself with her own aura of perfection, and she insists on striving for it Kavana - a Hebrew word for the focused mental state required for ritual dedication - justifying any collateral damage to the “robots” that get in their way. She is Moses standing on a mountaintop and descending the word of God to the masses, a gifted conduit for a message that has long been defined by its means of delivery.
It’s a role that Field demonstrates via the extent of the startling early sequence shot in which Lydia insults a nervous BIPOC Juilliard student for refusing to play the music of a dead racist white man like Bach. “Don’t be anxious to be offended,” Lydia chuckled from her piano seat, “The narcissism of small differences leads to compatibility.” As with many of this movie’s stern but uncomfortable scenes, the tension comes not from the tug of war between two rival faces, but from how they strangled together and strangled each other to death.
“tar”
On the other hand, Lydia argues that a single piece can be transformed by an endless array of interpretations. She plays a simple melody in three widely different ways, providing one of the few precious moments in which anyone in this movie is seen making music (Fild usually shivers away from an obsessive sense of deprivation, sending his audience heading towards the climax of the third act). On the other hand, it also reaffirms the old idea that the power of art is inseparable from the power we bestow upon it. This art cannot be preserved if we do not allow it to magnify and vice versa. “They can’t all act, my dear,” Lydia said calming her daughter later in the story. “It is not a democracy.”
In context, Lydia’s argument has its stifling merits, but Field fires it up in one long shot so he can slice it up on social media after Krista’s suicide sparked a viral storm over the conductor’s alleged misconduct. Lydia demands to know where Twitter was when Schopenhauer threw a random old woman down a staircase, but power has always been a demon’s bargain, and everyone in “TÁR” is forced to keep their own receipts of the transactional relationships that rule our world together.
Where a lesser version of this story may have leaned toward blaming the victim—or was so afraid to do so that she veered into a frustrating didactic form—the escalation of “TÁR” by aligning herself with Lydia as things went on. The film does not take her side, In itself , She adopts her character so that the story’s most important rhythms are played off screen just because Lydia refuses to hear it.
This slow meltdown upends the conductor’s relationship with a young, up-and-coming cellist in her orchestra (British debutant Sophie Kaur, who is instantly believable as Russia’s Olga Mitkina). The dynamic between them unfolds as a repetition of Lydia’s attempt with Krista, whose echoes resonate in Lydia’s ears over the course of a film dividing the difference between Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” psychic pallor and Stanley’s unsmiling dream Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”—in which Field himself plays an instrumentalist. Jazz Nick Nightingale. Nothing says “time’s up” quite like the ticking metronome that Lydia hears in the middle of the night.
The predatory intent of Lydia’s approach is undeniable, regardless of Olga’s reaction to it, but what is most evident is how these women have no other way of interacting with each other. The institution that brings them together is inflexibly hierarchical so that each chair is given special prominence based on its distance from the podium, and any hint of desire among the people sitting in it—personally or professionally, convenient or otherwise—is tainted by its proximity to power. To this point, “TÁR” is quite compelling in how it portrays the gossip and politics behind an elite orchestra, where Hildur Guðnadóttir’s unobtrusive score helps smooth the seams even as Lydia breaks up on screen.
But the undoing is what makes “TÁR” such a powerful tour, this long and patient film becoming less abstract and more relentlessly personal as Lydia reaches the end of her rope. Funnel-shaped sheets of gray sky and colorless concrete slabs - punctuated by text bubbles and false glimpses of ripe fruit within the first two hours - finally give way to the unexpected buzz of hot neon lights. The final stages of this story (and her sweet appearance in the final shot) are covered in a soft glow that feels like universes have been removed from the ruthless hardness of their buildup, and with impressive audacity, they manage to save “TÁR” from the same sarcasm that seemed certain to suffocate her.
“TÁR” might be seen as a social lightbar upon its initial release, if ever seen. But it will persist because of the strange tones it strikes in the middle of a world of white noise. Because of how she unhesitatingly watches Lydia “erase herself before the music”, and how convincingly she entertains the remote possibility that she might find a way to hear herself in it again.
Grade: A
The movie “Tár” premiered in 2022 Venice Film Festival. Focus Features will be released in theaters Friday, October 7.
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