Review of the film Tár with Cate Blanchett

It is not usual for the film to start with the end credits, moreover, running from the end – first the names of all the collaborators, until the last director. Tár is also not an ordinary film. American filmmaker Todd Field, who returned to directing for the first time since the 2006 drama As Little Children, does not present indisputable facts and clear conclusions. His portrait of the titular anti-heroine, a respected composer and conductor, resembles wandering through a labyrinth with many floors and exits. Our unreliable guide is Cate Blanchett, precise in every movement and gesture, having learned to speak German, play the piano and conduct for the role.

Right after the credits, before we are introduced to the story and introduced to the other characters, there is a quarter-hour interview of the protagonist with a journalist from the New Yorker. Pre-prepared questions are answered with equally prefabricated answers. We get a cross-section of the career and world of thought of Lydia Tár, winner of the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards, whose crowning achievement should soon be conducting Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the Berlin Orchestra. At the same time, for the first time, we experience the rigid respect that will accompany the meeting with the brilliant artist. The others treat her like an untouchable idol and she acts accordingly.

She also gained recognition in an industry still dominated by men by adopting the ruthless tactics of her competitors and predecessors. Hardly and pragmatically, they aim straight for the goal, they don’t look to the sides. Although she mentions one of her colleagues a few times, her role models are men. She consistently imitates their style of dress and poses during photo shoots, she refers to herself as the “father” of her child. She knows the biographies of Bach, Beethoven, Schopenhauer and other dead white heterosexuals by heart, but the debates about gender and women’s rights are foreign to her. She refuses to admit that without people like Klára Zetkin, whom she first hears about from her left-wing student, she would never have made it to the stage.

Lydia perceives the latter only as a scaffolding that she can climb up. If they no longer have anything to offer her to strengthen her position, she removes them in cold blood. But the higher he gets, the more hurt, abused and bitter people he leaves behind. The foundations on which her success and fame rests are increasingly shaky. A woman blinded by the illusion of her own uniqueness does not realize it at first. But when she begins to remember one of the ghosts of the past, a young musician who thwarted her career and destroyed her life, her rigorous universe begins to crack. There are more and more situations over which he has no control compared to carefully thought out public outputs.

She receives a Challenge book from an unknown sender about a lesbian relationship and suicide threats. The first page is decorated with an ornament of the Amazonian Shipibo-Conibo tribe, whose rituals Lydia previously studied. According to these natives, past and present events are happening simultaneously, which is one of the possible keys to the narrative. We may not be watching a character study, but a “spiritualist”. But the book is just the beginning. Lydia is awakened from her sleep by nightmares with Indian rituals and strange sounds. While jogging in the park, he hears an urgent female scream with no apparent source. Unknown beings appear in her Berlin apartment day and night, always for a brief moment.

The horror scenes, the frequency and intensity of which gradually increase until, in the half-dreamlike conclusion from the Philippines, it is impossible to separate reality from imagination, present the conductor’s worst fears: of transience, of death, of time catching up with her, which she speaks of in the opening interview and towards which action feels immune when conducting. As if she could stop him.

Those closest to her are the first to pay for her loss of balance. Talented German violinist Sharon, with whom she is raising a daughter. Or Francesca’s dedicated assistant, quietly putting up with her bullying and hoping that Lydia will help her fulfill her own artistic ambitions. But the acclaimed conductor is more interested in her new prey, the young Russian cellist Olga. The dispensability of these characters to the main heroine is expressed either by how late they enter the narrative, or by situating them at the edge of the shot. Tár, on the other hand, is at least initially in the center of the action and controls the space with strong words, movements and gestures.

This is most obvious during her performance at New York’s Juilliard School of the Arts. During an acting phenomenal scene, filmed in an uninterrupted eight-minute shot, she charges a student who dared to oppose her. They differ in whether the value of the work is co-determined by the gender, nationality or nature of the author. Not according to Lydia. Art should not be reduced to one’s identity. But she herself prefers women she likes when putting together an orchestra. Yes, her hypocrisy, abuse of power, trampling on the self-esteem of those who threaten her self-image are repulsive. At the same time, just like the camera, we cannot tear our eyes away from her.

This is precisely where the subtlety of Field’s approach lies. He placed a woman at the center of the story, who also fascinates thanks to Cate Blanchett’s technically flawless performance. Just as in reality we tend to be so captivated by extraordinarily intelligent, gifted individuals that we overlook their destructive patterns of behavior. However, the American director is more interested in the impact of her actions on those who remain in the shadows than the impenetrable composer. The main drama unfolds in the second plan and plot outlets, where Lydia does not see due to her self-centeredness. That’s why the film starts with the closing credits – so that we don’t forget that it is never the work of one master standing in the foreground, but of a whole host of capable people.

Although we spend most of the nearly three-hour footage in the company of Tár, we most often watch it from a distance or from someone else’s perspective. The film keeps a distance from her subjective experience. He breaks free from its thrall to provide us with objective clues that fill in the blanks, illuminate confusing clues, and subvert the myth of infallible genius. If this information awakens sympathy, then more so with persons whose lives the protagonist has negatively affected or passed by without noticing.

However, Tár does not end with pointing out the culprit, passing judgment and punishment. Characters are not either good or evil. Lydia is possibly a narcissistic manipulator, possibly a victim of a toxic environment going through an existential and spiritual crisis. Field does not excuse her, she does not evoke sympathy for her, but at the same time she avoids the black-and-white vision to which we are often drawn in the heat of the culture wars. It nuancedly reveals how institutional power corrupts a person and how due to the pursuit of professional perfection we lose our integrity, we become blind to those who are not useful to us.

Lydia Tár instills in her students that conducting is a matter of interpretation, not robotic imitation. In a similar way, Field’s film, which is challenging for the audience and exceptional in terms of filmmaking, invites the audience with its openness of meaning not to accept ready-made truths, not to be too enchanted by idols, and rather to look for their own point of view, their own way out of the maze.