TÁR (2022)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
Cate Blanchett has done everything necessary to win a third Oscar with an iconic, stunning performance.
Todd Field’s return to filmmaking after 16 years is a work of staggering genius. Nuanced, layered, challenging, and engrossing, TÁR is one of the best films of the year.
Blanchett’s performance aside, the ensemble cast, along with gorgeous cinematography, sound, and score, lock us into a world we succumb to, just as many in Lydia Tár’s world find themselves forced to do.
NO
A slow-burn of a film, the deliberate pacing may make some frustrated, wanting things to zip along faster. Your patience will be worth the wait.
If you require a likable character to anchor your film…this ain’t it.
Some have labeled the film as pretentious, unfeeling, and unresolved. Not my take, but the opinion is out there.
OUR REVIEW
Lydia Tár is a virtuosa. A maestra. A once-in-a-lifetime talent within the world of conducting and classical music. She is an EGOT winner (the rare entertainer who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award). Through her conducting of the heralded Berlin Philharmonic, she will be releasing her latest album - a performance of Mahler’s Fifth - completing what is known as the “Grand Slam” of conducting. She wants it released on vinyl. The record company seems resistant.
Tár gives on-stage interviews with sold out audiences. She moonlights as an adjunct professor at Juilliard in New York City when not living with her wife and young daughter in Berlin. And she surrounds herself with the chaos of noise and music, one arpeggio, segue, or movement at a time.
A creation of writer/director Todd Field, and astonishingly realized by Cate Blanchett’s incredible performance, there is no Lydia Tár in the real world. She will forever live within Field’s 157-minute magnum opus, his first film in 16 years, but also his best.
As much as any performance in recent memory, Blanchett dissolves into this persona with such ease and effortlessness, the transformation becomes unsettling. Within the film’s 17-minute opening sequence, where Lydia is interviewed by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, it is almost impossible to not be convinced that what we are witnessing is real. The depth and density in which Lydia talks about her craft, the arrogance that the audience applauds for and the intimidating, yet seductive presence she radiates is mesmerizing to see unfold.
Field embeds with Tár, Blanchett is in every scene, and we see her navigating a career both in Europe and America, being both kind and tacitly domineering with her personal assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlat), and trying to be a good mother to daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic) and as engaged a wife as possible to Sharon (Nina Hoss), concertmaster to the Berlin Philharmonic.
As enigmatic, bombastic, and bruising as Lydia can be, she is consumed by power. Power of everything in her life. An early scene in the film, where she becomes searingly angry with a young conducting student for his dismissal of Bach, has been used by right-wing culture pundits as evidence that TÁR is a film calling for an end to “cancel culture” (about as poor a read on the film as one can make).
Rather, Field is curious about the rationale people use to limit and restrict things from their own lives. With more and more available to us then ever before, why do people make the decision to eliminate? Sometimes it is easy, when, say, a celebrity embraces antisemitism or a serial abuser is seemingly allowed zero repercussions for their actions. Generational differences aside, Lydia cannot conceive of a world where someone can just have their entire oeuvre cut off and eliminated. The reasoning be damned, you just cannot do that. What about the art? What about the legacy? Perhaps what right-wing media misses on the memeification of this one scene is the broader context - why is Lydia so alarmed? What is she truly angry about? Why does the student’s dismissal of one composer’s work cut her so close to the quick?
When that power begins to unravel, when moments from Lydia’s past literally creep in around her, Field’s film slow-burns a descent into madness and uncertainty; a film that leaves us grasping to understand how someone who seemingly has it all can be so reckless, careless, and relentless in bulldozing everyone around them, including their most avid of supporters.
Stabs of sound, both from the power of an orchestra, and with the background noises and distractions which start to consume Lydia’s time to herself, add a layer of uneasiness to the proceedings. Oscar winner Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is subtle, but powerful. Florian Hoffmeister’s camera is confident and assured in the film’s first half, less so in the second half as Lydia’s world becomes shaken and a bit disoriented.
The immersive nature of the piece is what draws us into a world squeezing tighter and tighter around its centerpiece. The discoveries we make along with Lydia intensify in their explosiveness, until eventually, the creation of Lydia Tár is reduced to embers and the haunts of the past consume her carefully crafted existence.
In a career that now rivals the greatest to ever do it, others can decide if TÁR is Cate Blanchett’s best performance. All I can offer is that the two-time Oscar winner gives one of the most stunning and engrossing on-screen performances of recent memory. Todd Field’s comeback is, in its own right, a legendary composition, one of sensuous drama and engrossing mystery.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Mila Bogojevic, Julian Glover, Mark Strong, Allan Corduner, Sylvia Flote, Adam Gopnik, Zethphan Smith-Gneist, Sydney Lemmon, Lee R. Sellers
Director: Todd Field
Written by: Todd FIeld
Release Date: October 28, 2022
Focus Features