Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022) — Review

It may be Todd Field, rather than Todd Phillips, but praise God, insufferable classical musicians finally have their Joker. The jazz sadbois had their turn in Whiplash, but now it's time for a toxic, self-professed "U-Haul lesbian" to prove that she’s truly 'not like the other girls'- she’s worse. But also, somehow, better?

Like its subject, Tár has been flamed and fawned over in ample measure from all sides of the culture industry- possibly the highest form of praise for a movie that starts with a staged New Yorker interview. Bits are overblown, bits are undercooked, but it gets one thing right: everyone in this industry is a bit of a plonker.

In some ways, Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) recalls those uncanny valley, AI-generated pictures of people who don’t exist: hyper-realistic until you suddenly notice an extra finger or the like. Lydia slips seamlessly in and out of the ‘real life ‘ of November 2022- if reality even exists in the world of high art. From the opening gambit with the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik playing himself, to the slew of carefully curated record albums and her conducting the Dresden Philharmonic, Field telegraphs the utterly delusional nature of this very real world in masterful fashion.

We meet our anti-heroine preparing for a new recording of Mahler 5 and the release of her book, ‘Tár on Tár’, at the peak of a glittering career. She has an achingly stylish lifestyle, replete with Dries van Noten suits and private jets; her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) and young daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic) are ensconced in a palace of exposed concrete and cashmere back in Berlin. Underling and ex-paramour Francesca (Noémie Merlant) acts as watchful assistant, writing Gopnik’s notes, checking scores, and hustling her along when she lingers a little too long over the sapphic hotbed of an admirer’s handbag. Mark Strong, in a gloriously foul toupée, puts in an appearance as banker and amateur conductor Eliot Kaplan, the toadyish manager of her fellowship program. All is well, in a Marie Antoinette-ish kind of way rarely acknolwedged by the people who inhabit this world. Happily, the ugly human errors beneath this rarified perfection are about to bubble to the surface.

Tár raises an enormous number of issues without addressing them in a firm manner, like the film equivalent of dumping water on an electrical fire. But at least it makes clear that the fire exists. After the suicide of one of Lydia’s former students slash playthings, her pattern of predatory behaviour starts barrelling to public attention, in a nicely plotted trio with her professional and family crises. As we’ve seen so often in the last few years- whether with actors, musicians, or British Prime Ministers- once the cards start falling, the whole house can come down alarmingly fast. Thus, like Lydia’s audiences, subject to her meticulously planned and wildly narcissitic ideal of ‘controlling time’ with the baton, we’re off on a somewhat uneven but certainly colourful programme, spanning critical race theory, Hitchcockian lesbian vibes, psychodrama, and Gothic ghostliness.

Field’s film took something of a clobbering from the minorities in the field it purports to portray. Poor Marin Alsop, a legendary conductor who like Tár is a married lesbian mentored by Leonard Bernstein, suffered the indignity not only of having her biography ripped off, but being referenced in the film. “I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian,” she said. “There are so many (…) actual, documented men this film could have been based on but, instead, it (gives a woman) all the attributes of those men.” She has a point: Lydia is a lesbian lothario with a taste for power suits, who rejects the term ‘maestra’ and who, in the eyes not only of herself but her creators in the form of Blanchett and Field, sees power as a gender-neutral issue.

Alsop rightly objects to the injustice, and the ‘cancel culture’ arc of the predatory white woman forms the weakest part of the film in terms of its otherwise illusory realism. But gorgeous, sophisticated Lydia comprises a more nuanced and thrilling vehicle for the subject than, say, a Harvey Weinstein type. Joker comparisons are more apt than one might expect, not least due to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s scoring of both. Psychological villain origin stories like these benefit from a jarringly sympathetic, or normalised, star: Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman might have been less convincing if he looked like a pre-Ozempic Elon Musk. Blanchett’s Lydia opens an excellent angle onto the unabashedly personal nature of ‘professionalism’ in the suffocating world of classical music.

As Susan reminds her pill-popping, rakeish wife, the “politics” of the orchestra are everything. Classical musicians spend their lives honing one niche, financially unviable musical skill, but that amounts to less than half of the job: the other part is getting to put that skill to use. This objectively insane dynamic slips under the radar in everyday life: you can hear the Vivaldi sting in the Chef’s Table credits without ever stopping to think about who might be playing third bassoon. Tár does an elegant job of conveying this delicate but dangerous level of intrinsic personal bias, keeping us hovering over Lydia’s shoulder as her latest relationship develops- professional or personal? Field suggests in this world, the two are conjoined. Auditioning cellist Olga (real-life cellist Sophie Kauer, worryingly good in her first acting role) projects a mystery to be unravelled by both Lydia and the audience; a growing bank of questionable moments, never really crossing the line but lingering, uncertain, in the viewer’s mind, starts to blur with Olga’s musical ability and the growing pressures on Lydia’s marriage and career.

“I’m a musician,” says Lydia. “I don’t want to self-identify via my sexuality or my gender first and foremost, in the way that men don’t necessarily have to within the traditional confines of the classical music world.” She- incidentally a she, in this case- expresses a slyly universal sentiment. As Lydia tries to explain to the feeble caricature of an anti-Bach, ‘BIPOC pangender’ Julliard student, music and art in general at their best represent a way for people to express themselves for themselves, rather than via the perceptions of others. The periodic butchering of this message in clumsy sequences around a Twitter outrage, or the blinkered portrayal of young classical musicians in general, only adds to the film’s all-too-real point: the best artistic intentions go so wrong, so easily.