Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is fighting her stage fright with deep breaths, even though she’s been on the podium countless times before. She pats down her hair, her faithful assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) hands her pills and a drink of water before she ventures onstage for an interview before an audience with the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (playing himself). Gopnik ticks off her CV as she preps backstage—and the list of her accomplishments is almost unending.
She’s conducted symphony orchestras in Cleveland and Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston; she’s conducted the New York Philharmonic and now, the Berlin Philharmonic, where she’s about to complete her recordings of the Mahler symphonies for Deutsche Gramophone. She organized a much admired (and profitable) concert series to raise awareness of the refugee crisis. She was an ethnomusicologist in Peru, teaches conducting at Julliard and commissions new music (especially by female composers), programming it alongside canonical work “in a conversation that’s not always polite,” as Gopnik puts it. She won an Emmy, an Oscar, a Grammy and a Tony. She’s at the pinnacle of her success, but the pinnacle is sharp and she’s going to fall.
Tár, the remarkable new film by writer-director Todd Field (In the Bedroom), moves at a measured, some will say glacial pace as it gradually burrows into the life of its title character while offering lessons in musicology and aesthetics. If you never understood the role of a conductor, you’ll get it by the end of her interview with Gopnik. In her description, the conductor is a metronome and an interpreter. Her hands control time—pausing the music, setting the tempo, guiding the musicians to their destination. But the music is more than the correct arrangement of notes. The conductor, Lydia says, must understand the composer’s intentions while understanding her own response to them.
“Gender bias?” Gopnik asks. “I have nothing to complain about,” she responds, adding that the “heavy lifting” in classical music had already been accomplished by such distinguished predecessors as Nadia Boulanger. Oh, and her memoir is about to be published by Doubleday, and yes, Leonard Bernstein was her role model.
Lydia lives in Berlin with her wife, the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, Sharon (Nina Hoss), in the studied elegance of a cold, cavernous dwelling. They have a grade-school daughter, Petra, whom Lydia protects by going to her schoolyard and threatening the bullies. She jets back to Julliard where—having no use for people who store their brains in silos—she eviscerates a woke student who claims, that as BIPOC, he can’t appreciate Bach. She plays some Bach on the piano, showing how in his music one mystery leads to another with no ultimate answer.
Tár is like that. On one level it’s about a culture where accusation equals guilt, as pious committees convene and digital mobs form around an accusation that she caused the suicide of Krista, an ex-student, by blocking her career for reasons personal not musical. The news triggered additional accusations from women who claimed she offered to exchange sexual for professional favors. Tár shows how easily “evidence” can be spliced together from random cellphone videos. Tár can be read as an indictment of “canceling” but also of a workplace culture of sexual favoritism that passed uncritiqued until recently. Tár leaves open the possibility that Krista is crazy but that things untoward may have happened in the past, and might be happening in the present, as Lydia schemes to replace an aging assistant conductor and shuffle the chairs to make way for new talent.
Because she’s outspoken and in charge, Lydia is disliked by some film critics who need to critique their own unexamined attitudes toward women. Blanchett plays her as a fierce intellect who suffers no fools; she’s towering and determined, an articulate artist with a strong nose for the business behind the concert hall curtains.
Perhaps Lydia has emulated Bernstein in his profligate ways as well as his conducting? And maybe she’s unravelling under pressure? Tár’s chronicle of small events doesn’t neatly cohere as Lydia becomes sensitive to odd sounds in the night, overhears screams from the woods while jogging and enters the apartment building of a new orchestra member to find that it’s an abandoned shell. Why is the metronome in her study suddenly ticking back and forth at midnight? Is someone gaslighting her? Is a colleague trying to steal her music?
Blanchett also rises to playing Lydia cracking under pressure as Tár gradually peels away unexpected layers of her life. Tár’s director worked with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, and not unlike Kubrick’s final film, Tár is content to be a dusky enigma with no ultimate answer.
