Lydia Tár is a colossus. She is a self-made maestro, her peerless achievements carefully curated by herself via Wikipedia and an extended interview with Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival. She is a polymath, an EGOT, a guest teacher at Juilliard, mentored by Leonard Bernstein and arguably the greatest composer on earth. Her forthcoming book, Tár on Tár will be another long-standing monument to her own greatness. She is a tyrant resplendent in hand-made trouser suits that swish and snap in perfect time to her Aryan posturing. Tár cannot help but exude the elitist ideals of high culture, classical music, the superiority of the Austro-German canon.
She is fully committed to the complete separation from art and artist, “You want to dance the mask, you must service the composer. You gotta sublimate yourself, your ego, and, yes, your identity. You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself.”
However, Tár’s destruction of self is that of her meagre childhood and the perpetual grooming of young female musicians and composers, rather than the cultural titan that leers down from the heavens in posters and magazine supplements to grace mere mortals with her aloof genius.
Her genius, her ethereal power is that she can control time, “Keeping time is no small thing’ she tells Gopnik, and in many ways Tár is a sorcerer, gesticulating into the air commands and spells that manoeuvre the hands, the breath, even the heartbeats of others. Isn’t her conductor’s baton really a wand? And with that power surely, she can do anything she wishes or desires?
Like a necromancer she haunts a cavernous home, a brutalist shrine (tomb?) to her hubris, forever illuminated by artificial light that threatens to reveal the artifice of her meticulously constructed façade. Was she ever mentored by Bernstein?
Grandiose, like the imperial eagle, Tár swoops through the concrete and wood interiors of orchestral spaces, cathedrals to privilege, deifying mortal composers, battlements, and murder holes to defend their ascent against anyone who would question their divinity. Witness Tár stalk around her Juilliard class in one glorious take, too detached, too arch, too sophisticated to get her point across to what may have been her younger self. Max, one of her students can’t engage with Bach due to identity politics, “The problem with enrolling yourself as an ultrasonic epistemic dissident is that if Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality, and so on, then so can yours.”
Tár may or may not have a point but she fails to see the world shifting beneath her feet as she is forever looking at the heavens, plotting her own version of immortality. Her class is a shrine to her own pretentiousness, further exacerbated when she watches Bernstein on an old VHS tape give a far simpler explanation as to why music moves us. Her wife, Sharon is a nervous wreck, paranoid of being supplanted by a newer version, possibly Tár’s personal assistant, Francesca, who attempts to position herself as her new assistant conductor. Tár is also attracted to a new Russian cellist, Olga, a new cycle in an old desperate habit as seen by Tár trying to blacklist her former lover, Krista.
Directed by Todd Field, Tár is his first film in sixteen years and feels like a spiritual cousin to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, a film he had a small role in. Both feature a permissive, privileged society exploiting the young and vulnerable for their own gratification. Michael Chion in his BFI book Eyes Wide Shut writes, “For some members of this society, social taboos and rules of behaviour no longer forbid what is called, ‘living out your fantasies’, while being unfaithful to your wife or husband is no longer something that requires an apology on moral grounds.”
In 2022, Tár still doesn’t offer an apology but is cancelled by the younger generation and is seen desperately plotting her way back into the culture with a disaster PR firm. Tár doesn’t explicitly comment on identity politics or cancel culture but is a riveting examination of identity, a dark comedy about an imposter slipping into a world closeted from them and the lengths they will go to stay in there and maintain the power they have accumulated. Tár is now the signature performance of Cate Blanchett and a film that has one of the great cinematic denouements of recent memory.
As Lydia Tár says, “Don’t be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring kind of conformity.”