She is dangerously good

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Lydia Tár is the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. She is brilliant, charismatic, fearless, self-centered, sensual, manipulative and rather pretentious. In addition, she undoubtedly falls under the modern term “problematic”, in a way similar men in her position have been allowed to be for centuries. Incidentally, she is also fictional, although you should be forgiven for taking the story as true, taking into account the relatively unsensational, realistic action and the exceptionally solid, believable portrait of the main character.

Angular and cold

With a concise and measured narrative style – and a sharp and modernist/brutalist scenography that is used to the full to capture the characters’ angular and cold soul lives – Field allows us to get to know the person and the phenomenon of Lydia, before he slowly begins to pick her apart.

A show of power

Field takes his time tuning the instruments. The first quarter of the film is a panel discussion in which Tár unfolds his view of art to a receptive and elitist audience. Only after half an hour do some musical instruments appear, as she is going to hold a masterclass at the prestigious Juilliard, and her uncompromising (possibly ruthless) demand that we all submit to the power of art, even if it comes at the expense of our own identity, goes into clinch with a coloured, queer student’s reluctance to play Bach because of the composer’s views on women.

And it takes a full hour before we get to meet her own orchestra and take part in the creative processes, the art bureaucracy and the visible and invisible power structures at such an institution, where her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) is the first violinist.

Countdown

The countdown is approaching both for the launch of Tár’s autobiography and the recording of Mahler’s 5th symphony (the same piece that sets the tone for the film adaptation of “Death in Venice”, another tale of an artist on his way out of his own time).

A new cellist is to be employed. The second conductor must be squeezed out. There is always something left unsaid and simmering. It involves a former protégé and possibly muse, and the actions of which Lydia’s tried and tested assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) is the only one who knows anything about.

It says something about Blanchett’s performance that this overly elaborate prelude never gets boring. When the web gradually begins to tighten around the conductor, and the repetitive chorus of her behavior is about to catch up with her at the same time as we see it play out again, luckily the nerve also appears.

Must be experienced!

No chronicle

“Tár” deals with something as typical of the time as #metoo and the so-called cancellation culture, but don’t let yourself be intimidated into thinking that this is a filmed, clever chronicle for that reason. The film is descriptive, and so little polemical that it will be interesting to see how different sides of today’s culture war will read it. This is the kind of film where what you take out of it is colored by what you took in.

Certainly, making Tár a woman – in more conventional hands the story might as well have been told about a man – adds both a breath of fresh air and a clear perspective. It removes some aspects of gender politics and makes it clear that gender is secondary to what this sort of thing has always been about: power.

Character portrait

With that said, the film keeps some of the details so close to its chest that it robs this specific scenario of both complexity and ambivalence. As an input in the debate about both metoo, identity politics and cancellation culture, it is therefore only willing to keep a bird’s eye view. Maybe that’s wise.

The film thus becomes more of a depiction of power structures. Of the tension between the artist behind the art, the person behind the artist, and the context(s) they all exist in, which is always changing.

Punished after statement

But most of all it is a character portrait of the highest class. Lydia Tár’s success as a conductor is surpassed only by her ability to gaslighte both the people around him and himself.

She is sensitive to all kinds of noise when trying to work or sleep, but consistently unable to hear those closest to her knocking on real and metaphorical doors. She refers to the less artistically inclined musicians as robots, while at the same time she is instrumental and transactional in all her realities, and not least compares her work as a conductor to being a metronome – i.e. the small, mechanical clockwork that clicks the beat for musicians. Extending the comparison, she also makes herself master of the concert hall’s cosmos, as someone who can literally stop time and hold it between her fingertips.

Complicated, complex meat

Blanchett’s Lydia is broad-legged, towering, and alternately menacing and flattering (she’s usually a head taller than the consistently frumpy men who appear in this film). To say she plays Tár as a man is too easy. She uses her entire vast register and ambiguous, sinister charisma to portray an ambitious, ego-driven, insecure, dangerous, arrogant, hard-working, neurotic, vulnerable, brilliant and clueless artist. A complicated, complex mess. An individualistic woman who refuses to become a figurehead for her gender, while knowing exactly how to stage herself and curate her legacy – at least until the 21st century and the world outside the philharmonic bubble knocks and refuses to be directed by her staff.

Gives you goosebumps

Field certainly makes it difficult for himself when he portrays such a static character without placing her in sufficiently stressful situations to make clear precisely this inability to develop. The insights and solutions are not forthcoming. And the fact that the film literally ends as a skit almost makes me wonder if this is intended as satire or dark comedy.

But “Tár” is nevertheless a distinctive film about a distinctive type of person in a distinctive field. A commendable and award-worthy portrait of a fictional artist larger than life, realized by a real one.