5. Tár, dir. Todd Field
We are meant to love Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett, in an all-timer great role). But Lydia Tár is a brand name, a performance designed to sell herself as the great conductor of her age. That is not even her real name. Still, we are introduced to Tár at the height of her power, at her most glamorous.
We meet her in Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, seemingly at home on a stage surrounded by rows and rows of onlookers. There's Adam Gopnik interviewing her. This Tár we meet is more than up to the challenge of winning a crowd. She can not only answer the questions, but elaborate on them, while not diminishing her host. She can reference the Talmud, multiple musical theories, and even the personal history of her favorite composer. You know if you met Lydia Tár at a party, she would be intimidating because no matter the subject, she probably knows more about it, and could explain her point more eloquently. If ever there was a superhero of the sophisticated cocktail party set, it would be her.
But also, in the background, there is a ghost. We only set it from behind. Red hair in the crowd, watching Lydia seem so invincible and so perfect. This ghost will continue to haunt Tár in the background. There are moments where the movie jumps genre to horror. Lydia will hear a woman scream while jogging in Berlin but never finds the source. In one scene, you can see that same red-haired woman standing in Lydia's home, back to the camera, half hidden in the background. At night, Lydia keeps awaking, alone but not alone.
Lydia Tár has a recurring tick of dismissing all criticism with a single pejorative: "robot". (As a conductor, she is naturally terrified of becoming a metronome, an automation clicking, rather than a human controlling time creativity.) If you are like Lydia, you're a free thinker. If not, no matter your case or your perspective, you're regurgitating some inane thought unworthy of discussion. Early in Tár, just after her magnificent performance with Adam Gopnik, Lydia hosts a class with Julliard students. When one student mentions his disinterest with the same cast of dead white men that have dominated classical music for centuries, Tár gets aggressive and feverish in one long take. She bullies him and humiliates him. And of course, there's that same word "robot". For somebody so clearly brilliant, so knowledgeable of the failures of her predecessors, there is no flexibility here.
Notably, for all her accusations that her opponents are merely pieces of mindless programming, Tár is herself trapped in a cycle of self-destructive behavior with no interest in self-reflection or second-guessing. You spend the entirety of Tár knowing every one of her actions are a mistake, the disaster is so obvious. You can beg her to do anything other than what she is doing, yet the sequence towards calamity is inevitable.
By the time we meet Tár, she has repeated a process of grooming, exploitation, and betrayal at least twice, and is already on her way to a third. This has happened to Krista, the ghost that Lydia will not acknowledge. She seems to have repeated the process with Francesca (Noémie Merlant) her current assistant. Then a young Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer) catches Lydia's eye, and is rewarded for their growing closeness with a prominent solo. Everybody around Lydia knows these patterns. You can see it in their exasperated looks, basically rolling their eyes to each other. As long as Tár is the superstar, the genius, all this must be tolerated, treated as a joke, or strategically ignored.
There have been movies about powerful predators before, even ones dealing with our current climate of "#MeToo" or "Cancel Culture" (a thoroughly tortured phrase now made useless by reactionaries). Kitty Green's The Assistant from two years ago kept us at the ground floor, never letting us see the abuse or the abuser, but still feeling the shocks of the crimes. Tár is different in that the abuser in question is our heroine. She's at times a great mother, she's clearly a brilliant conductor, a snazzy dresser, but she's also a clumsy consumer of people, carelessly leaving the wreckage of lives behind her - including her own after a certain point.
Tár is a tragedy, but a very limited one. We see our heroine/anti-heroine humiliated, have everything that matters taken from her. Except celebrity, except power. She can still find work, maybe in less glamorous circumstances. She'll still get waited on, have all expenses paid, and be given two aides to lead her around. She has a home to go back to, even if its in Hell land called Staten Island. Maybe in the last act, Lydia finds some recognition, maybe there is some justice in her vomiting on the street. Reduced from performing Mahler's Fifth Symphony to nearly choosing a prostitute in a fish bowl labeled #5. That is the only justice we the we can hope for now.
Is the ghost haunting Tár satisfied with that justice? We never do find out.
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