Tár is my favorite kind of film. The kind that traffics in the gray areas of life’s most sensitive situations, with a witty script whose tone strikes a balance between darkly funny and deeply disturbing, and the kind of imagery and atmosphere that burrows into your brain and stays there long after you’re done watching.
It’s a very specific niche that only the most maturely-made films are able to achieve, and I got the impression that Tár would be one of those movies from the reviews written after its dazzling debut at the Venice Film Festival in September. Having seen it now, I’m thrilled to say that Tár is indeed that great - greater, even. It’s a searing, hypnotic, beguiling drama full of razor-sharp dialogue, precise visual storytelling, and a central performance you simply can’t take your eyes off of.
Directed by Todd Field, Tár follows the life of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), a world-renowned, prodigious orchestra conductor whose life may be on the brink of falling apart due to past misdeeds slowly coming to light. We learn at the start of the film that Lydia is an EGOT winner, a protege of Leonard Bernstein (whom she calls “Lenny”), and currently the head of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, where she’s been painstakingly preparing a recording of Mahler’s 5th Symphony. These and many other facts about her life are heaped on us during a lengthy, mesmerizing interview sequence that opens the film, placing us firmly inside the brilliant, vivid mind of its protagonist. You quickly begin to feel the gravitational pull she seems to exert over the world.
Though Lydia is a fictional character, you tend to forget that while watching the film, not least thanks to Blanchett’s absolutely spellbinding performance. The way she captures Lydia’s confidence, her ferocity, her quirky genius, her jealousy, her quiet terror - all down to the smallest facial tics - is a thing of wonder, and immediately convinces you that you’ve known Lydia for far longer than the film’s (admittedly hefty) runtime. Combined with Field’s artful yet naturalistic script and the immersive cinematography, you feel like you’re watching a twisted documentary about a real-life person whose world is crumbling before her eyes.
At nearly three hours, Tár is certainly a slow burn, but the type that consistently rewards the attentive viewer. Its first third - which is devoted to fleshing out Lydia’s career and personal life - is perhaps its most daunting, with dialogue rich in highbrow metaphors and classical-music jargon. None of it, however, feels bloated or contrived - there’s a precision to the filmmaking that makes every frame feel deliberate and part of a grander design. Indeed, the film’s harrowing, riveting second half is all about watching its carefully-assembled house of cards collapse in slow motion.
Much has been made about the film’s subject of “cancel culture” - which I do believe to be a real problem in today’s society - but I found that the film approached the issue with an admirable sense of balance and restraint. “Separation of art from the artist” is a theme the film prominently and cleverly explores through its milieu of classical music, whose greats are all famously guilty of all flavors of sin, and yet continue to have their work studied, performed, and celebrated all the same. Lydia repeatedly comments on this herself in conversations with her colleagues, which at first glance seems like her hypocrisy on full display. There’s a deeper layer to it, though - it seems to suggest that Lydia tends to live outside herself, almost, viewing her own life from something resembling a third-person perspective. Rather than the separation between art and artist, the film appears more interested in examining the separation between artist and self - especially as they reach higher peaks of excellence - and how this can breed a certain entitlement that gives cover to one’s darker impulses. Indeed, Lydia is shown to have just published a bestselling autobiography (cheekily titled “Tár on Tár”), which further illustrates the seemingly out-of-body nature of her lived experience.
The film doesn’t appear to take a clear side on the cancel-culture issue, but with the level of nuance and humanism in its approach, perhaps we’re being asked to question whether taking a “side” is even the right way to go about things. Without giving away the plot, I commend the film for clearly condemning Lydia’s behavior where necessary, but at the same time suggesting that her contribution to art (and more broadly, the beauty of how she sees the world) are not to be dismissed outright. Early in the film, there’s a mesmerizing, one-take scene of Lydia teaching a class at Juilliard, where she says of Bach, “he’s not pretending he’s certain of anything. He knows it’s the question that involves the listener. Never the answer.” This might as well be the thesis statement for the film itself.
While Blanchett is undeniably the centerpiece of the movie, Field’s direction is her co-star, crucial in constructing the film’s distinct, irresistible tone and texture. Tár is most striking whenever it delves into psychological horror, using a series of haunting visual and auditory motifs throughout the film that slowly reveal their significance to the story over time. This technique is masterfully used to portray the nagging terror of knowing you’ve done something wrong and feeling like you’re about to finally be punished for it. Between the unsettling atmosphere and the film’s editing - which gets more aggressively choppy as the film goes on, and frequently employs visual cues rather than dialogue to convey what’s happening - the movie takes on this spectral, surreal quality that perfectly encapsulates the dizzying nature of a gifted individual’s fall from grace.
Like a symphony, the supporting players in the cast and crew are every bit as important as its star in bringing the film to life. I was especially impressed with Sophie Kauer as a wily young Russian cellist named Olga, the latest target of Lydia’s obsessions. Kauer is herself a trained cellist for whom Tár was her first acting gig (at age 19, no less), which makes the effortless precision and casual confidence of her performance all the more staggering. Her cello playing, too, represents the rare moments where the music in this film is allowed to be beautiful. (The music in Tár is otherwise examined more often than it is enjoyed, functioning more as a metaphor for Lydia’s perfectionism and fraying psyche.) Additionally, Nina Hoss (from Homeland, one of my favorite shows) gives a quietly devastating performance as Lydia’s embittered wife and concertmaster who seems all too aware of Lydia’s devious machinations, while the production design and cinematography cast Lydia’s elegant, upper-class world in a cold and clinical light, further amplifying the film’s macabre undertones.
Cellist Sophie Kauer plays Olga, her first-ever acting performance.
Tár is a bold, ambitious film that sets out to wholly deconstruct a character we’ve only just met, meaning its success rests entirely on how convincingly Blanchett portrays Lydia as someone worthy of our fascination. Needless to say, she absolutely knocks it out of the park, giving us a highly specific, richly textured portrait of an extraordinary human being whose own humanity is often her Achilles’ heel. Lydia is hardly someone I’d enjoy spending time with in real life, but Blanchett makes her endlessly watchable all the same, inspiring tremendous empathy for someone whose power and prestige put her in a position that’s seemingly impossible to relate to. If all is right in the world, Lydia Tár will be remembered as one of the greatest and most unique characters created for cinema.
The film is also immense fun despite its deliberate pace and the darkness inherent to its story. Lydia is at once icy and bursting with life, possessing an acid wit and steely confidence that make her highly entertaining to watch as she navigates the murky politics of the music-conservatory world. The film’s ending is also essentially one big punchline that feels absolutely perfect for the story Field is telling, drawing from the most unlikely and hilarious reference to make its point.
Tár is not the type of film to score billions at the box office, but it’s one that deserves to be rewatched, dissected, and argued about for years to come. It’s perhaps the best piece of fiction that will be made about today’s outrage-driven social media climate, and anyone who considers themselves a lover of film owes it to themselves to experience it in all its glory. There’s a million other things I could say about the movie - especially its themes of gender, as well as the ways it made me reflect on my own passion for the arts - which I’ll likely explore in another blog post. For now, all I can promise is that watching Tár for the first time is a privilege. This movie is art, pure and simple. Prepare to be captivated.