Review: Tár (2022)
Cate Blanchett is everything in this "Citizen Kane" for the classical music world
Tár (2022)
Written and directed by Todd Field
While Todd Field’s “Tár” is a year and a half old now, and well-known, approaching it from a critical perspective still feels like a lot to take on. Like any great film — and I am certainly willing to apply that superlative to it — it offers many routes of approach.
You could consider it as one of the several films that came out during and after the #MeToo era1, as an illustration of the workings of a manipulative, possibly psychopathic boss. You could approach it as a horror film where the monster is both the protagonist and a hard-to-pin-down malevolent force in her household. You could view it as a modern “Citizen Kane,” a tragedy of a hubristic genius who falls from a great height. It also contains, for someone more versed in the classical music industry than I’ll ever be, a political satire of the institution of the major symphony orchestra.
The story itself, while simple in one way — as she prepares the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for a major recording date, the consequences of Lydia Tár’s manipulative behavior and her high-handed ways emerge until they can no longer be ignored or excused — is quite complex in the details.
And if there is something this movie is rich in, it’s detail. The backstory alone is weighty enough to ring bells throughout the film: Lydia (née Linda Tarr — the change in her name to the more exotic Lydia Tár speaks volumes) rose in the world of classical music as a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, and even more than that famously bisexually rampaging figure, failed to develop healthy boundaries in personal relationships. She treats young, talented women specially, gives them unusually intimate access to herself, and then — in at least one case — cuts them off when they threaten her carefully constructed life at the top.
This is the case with a woman named Krista, a young conductor who was a fellowship recipient in a program Lydia founded, but who has already disappeared — been dismissed, apparently — when the movie begins. The protégé who replaced Krista, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), has become Lydia’s personal assistant and is encouraged to think of herself as her understudy (though we never see her at the podium). Through hints dropped along the way by the brilliant, wondrously constructed script, the viewer understands that the intimacy between Lydia and her protégés tends to go beyond the boundaries of a professional relationship. How far beyond is never explained, but its rupture is enough to cause a complete breakdown in the rejected Krista. When they learn that Krista has committed suicide, Francesca is shattered. “The three of us were so close,” she says. This is tush-tushed by Lydia, who was already so angered by Krista’s continued pleas for attention that she deleted all of Krista’s emails and demanded that Francesca do the same. “She was never one of us,” Lydia says of Krista. “Now we must forget her.” This is the threatening, hidden part of Lydia’s backstory.
The public story, shaped by Francesca and spelled out in an opening scene of a New Yorker Festival conversation hosted by that magazine’s Adam Gopnik (who plays himself), is presented as a glowing march to the leadership of the world’s great orchestras. In addition to showing viewers how famous and admirable Lydia is, this scene and one that shortly follows show us two things. First, that she is arrogant but understands how to insert just enough humanity and humility to disarm listeners; and second, that despite a record of supporting current composers and young women conductors, Tár is musically quite conservative, revering Beethoven, Bach, and Mahler.
To reinforce these points, in a subsequent scene where she teaches a master class at Julliard, she badgers a young BIPOC queer conducting student (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist) who “isn’t into Bach” because the composer of the Mass in B Minor fathered 20 children and is 300 years old and white. At first she seems to treat the students with generous patience, cajoling them to hear the beauty in a Bach piano piece. But in the next breath she indirectly insults both their musical taste and them personally. Such are the ways of a manipulator who showers their intended victims with both praise and criticism. But she has picked the wrong victim: the student gets fed up and leaves in a huff, and Lydia is at least momentarily speechless.
So this Lydia Tár is a huge character, both a monster and a genius. Vastly accomplished, she has earned all her accolades and prestige, while simultaneously wrecking the life of anyone who stands in her way. Young female students whom she woos, then dumps (Tár is a lesbian) aren’t the only victims of her twisted ambition; she’s also willing to treat colleagues disrespectfully. She lunches with a fellow but less accomplished conductor; she thinks he’s her inferior but behaves with the requisite amount of civility because he’s also on the board of her foundation. Only later, when she has no more use for him, does she fling in his direction the most cutting insult she can think of.
Aside from the pleasure of watching, in the title role, Cate Blanchett’s great talent, the most admirable thing about the film is the script; each makes the other great. Even after two viewings you will have missed some of the subtle hints contained in Blanchett’s performance and in the dialogue. Francesca’s line “The three of us were so close” contains the most direct evidence that something beyond professional mentoring goes on between Lydia and her protégés, and Lydia’s response “She was never one of us” reinforces both her relationship to Francesca and her manipulative methods. This is where we get the expression “to be in someone’s good graces” — a cult leader, or a controlling partner or friend, must create a strong sense among their followers that to be in the group is a state of grace, to be out is to be thrown out of the garden, and above all, that the leader can decide at any moment to include or exclude.
There are many story threads I haven’t even mentioned: Lydia’s relationships with her spouse Sharon (the icy Nina Hoss, whom I just saw in Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”); with Sharon’s nine-year-old daughter Petra, the only relationship Lydia has that is not transactional; with her predecessor Andris (Julian Glover); and with the orchestra’s assistant conductor Sebastian (Allan Corduner), whom she seeks to replace. The death of a neighbor in Lydia’s apartment building and haunting, indistinct sounds in the building and elsewhere symbolize the mounting anxiety Lydia feels as cracks emerge in her steely façade. As I say, there is too much detail to uncover in a single viewing.
I also recognize the brilliance of Todd Field’s directing. The scene at Julliard is a single take lasting 14 minutes. As Lydia prowls the lecture hall where she is simultaneously instructing and humiliating the poor student who’s been chosen to present, the camera follows her. From the back of the stage to the front, from the auditorium’s front row back to the podium, to an onstage piano and then to rear of the hall, the camera follows her. The single take concentrates the viewer’s attention on Lydia and her methods: alternately praising and dissing, lyrical about Bach and then quoting a scandalous phrase attributed to another composer, finally forcing the unfortunate youth to salvage their dignity the only way they can, by walking out.
Among other things, Lydia believes that the only way into a score is to divine the composer’s intent, which any postmodernist would strongly disagree with. As for her own composition work, she struggles with a piece throughout the movie and doesn’t get much of anywhere with it. We see her decide to dedicate the composition to Petra, her partner’s child (“I am Petra’s father,” she declares in one scene, an admirable puff of rhetorical fog), but if this creates a moment where the viewer hopes she can partially redeem herself by connecting her work to her one blameless personal relationship, we don’t see that happen. Instead, her professional fall is complete. In the final scene she’s still conducting, but what music — and especially for what audience — is tragically ironic.
I’ve tried to be vague about key plot elements up to now, but the rest of this article does contain specific spoilers.
I wrote this on the day that a New York appeals court overturned the conviction of Harvey Weinstein for sex crimes committed in New York, crimes for which he is currently serving a sentence in state prison. (He will remain in jail while awaiting a new trial, and has also been convicted and given a prison term for sex crimes he committed in California.)
Lydia Tár’s downfall is engineered by a combination of her own continued bad behavior and by the betrayal of those in her inner circle. Francesca resigns from the orchestra and disappears after Lydia tells her that “someone more qualified” will get the assistant conductor post. Krista’s parents have launched a legal case against Lydia, and when Lydia testifies at a deposition, it’s clear their lawyers possess the emails that she had asked Francesca to delete. Then someone edits a phone video of her humiliating the Julliard student into an even more damning clip, and it goes viral on social media. When Lydia returns to New York for the launch of her new book, she has to make her way through a crowd of angry protesters bearing “Justice for Krista” banners. By the time the Berlin Philharmonic cuts her loose, it’s clear that whispers about her professional and personal relationships — with Francesca, with a new young cellist whom Lydia has begun grooming, and I haven’t even mentioned that her spouse Sharon is the orchestra’s concertmaster — have become so loud that they have taken over the narrative.
I wonder, without feeling the remotest bit of sympathy or pity for him, what Harvey Weinstein’s last day at work2 must have been like, as woman after woman finally came forward to denounce him for his assaults over more than two decades. What were the expressions on the faces of the staff whom he had emotionally abused for years as he made his way through the office? Did they allow themselves to show hatred, schadenfreude, relief? Things don’t usually work out that way, of course; horrible people rarely get their comeuppance. The humiliation of Weinstein, or Guiuliani, or Tár, constitutes a Hollywood ending. More common is the ending experienced by, say, Ronald Reagan or Henry Kissinger, culpable for mass murder but allowed to die in their beds still thinking, and hearing from sycophants, that they are great men.
UPDATE: I had more to say about “Tár.” Read my follow-on essay in which I further discuss point of view and intent, and pose the question “Would Lydia Tár shoot her dog?”: Essay: Tár, Civil War, and intention
Including May/December, Fair Play, The Assistant — all reviewed previously here — and “She Said.”
“Harvey Weinstein Is Fired After Sexual Harassment Reports,” New York Times, 8 October 2017; “Harvey Weinstein, Fired on Oct. 8, Resigns From Company’s Board,” New York Times , 17 October 2017
Yes, I think I was also confused, back when it came out, about whether it was a documentary or what. The New Yorker interview scene does nothing to clear this up. "They Shot the Piano Player" (which I reviewed on Apr. 1) makes a similar and even more confusing feint.
This is one of the best movies I've seen in the past decade.
I haven't kept very close tabs on the classical music world in the last couple of decades, so for some reason I thought this was based on a REAL Person 🫠 based on a review I read in (I think) in The New Yorker or NYT... Luckily I figured out it was not a real person before watching, but it might as well have been.
But wow. What a movie. It's one of those that sneak up on you and blow your mind. The ending was so satisfying. Thanks for the awesome write-up. I have to watch it again.