TÁR Review

TÁR will release in Indian cinemas on March 10, 2023.

The dense, meticulously constructed TÁR is writer-director Todd Field’s first feature in 16 years (his last film, Little Children, secured him an Oscar nod for Best Adapted Screenplay). A chronicle of power, talent, and ego, it stars the impeccable Cate Blanchett in the role of a lifetime: Lydia Tár, a fictitious world-famous composer and conductor, a woman so richly sketched that you’d be forgiven for confusing her for a real-life figure. In that vein, TÁR often plays like an innovative biopic, one that bides its time before revealing fascinating layers to its character and story. It’s a lengthy film, and by no means an easy one, and while its protracted first act seems puzzlingly languid, it paves the way for an enveloping drama you can get lost in for ages. Even at 2 hours and 37 minutes long, it leaves you grasping for more.

Plenty of new films are touted as being of the “MeToo era,” with their stories of abusers and survivors. Just as many are the opposite, built upon fears of “cancel culture.” TÁR is among the rare few that earns its keep as both, but without ever feeling reactionary. It’s an examination of power structures that’s as unblinking in its depiction of abuse as it is nuanced in its portrait of flawed, selfish humanity (and ultimately, of artistic genius), a film that wholly rejects the notion of separating the art from the artist if it leads to a deeper, more soulful understanding.

TÁR begins with a New Yorker symposium hosted by real-life journalist Adam Gopnik, whose rundown of Lydia’s achievements prior to their interview — appearing in the form of introductory voiceover — affords Field enough time to construct a montage of her professional life behind the scenes, from the way she selects her fitted suits, to how she lays out old orchestral records on her apartment floor, as if she were drawing a roadmap to some secret musical treasure. When their conversation finally begins, it plays out at length on a fancy Manhattan stage, not only for the sake of inserting Lydia into real-world music history — she was a protégé to the late Leonard Bernstein, and a mentor to Joker and Chernobyl composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who scored this very film — but in order to open up a detailed dialogue on composing and musical interpretation.

The text feels, at first, impenetrable to anyone not already immersed in the world of contemporary classical music, but it opens up pressingly relevant conversations on artistic methodology, and the way artists are canonized. For instance, the staged interview — filmed and edited as if for television, but with enough lingering shots of Lydia bristling against certain questions — brings up, among other artists, 19th century composer Gustav Mahler, and his personal and professional control over his wife, Alma. Lydia, a Mahler devotee, has complicated feelings on the matter, which only grow thornier in a subsequent scene (filmed in a riveting, invisible long take) as she admonishes a young, queer student of color for dismissing and reducing the largely straight-white-male classical canon to the broad strokes of identity. She’s ostensibly correct, if also dismissive herself. The point of these scenes is not to provide a definitive answer on how to approach the “problematic,” but rather, to inject the film with a sense of present-ness, capturing a snapshot of “the now” in order to ground us in an ever-evolving artistic and academic climate. (At one point, a news article is dated November 2022; TÁR essentially takes place a month into the future).

With these questions posed, though by no means answered, Field ponders them in roundabout fashion. He takes us on a tour of the maestro’s globetrotting personal life (she prefers the term to “maestra”), from her curt interactions with her diligent assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant), to her domestic life in Berlin with her adopted daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), and her violinist wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss) — the concertmaster at the Berlin orchestra she conducts full-time — to the guarded caution with which she responds to the advances of young female admirers. But there is something in her past, some interaction or relationship in particular she hopes to hide, whether by instructing Francesca to delete desperate emails she deems “strange,” or by spinning her own web about a former student she claims was “disturbed.”

Field plays coy with the details at first, allowing them to largely manifest as dream sequences filmed as if through water, mysterious shapes that appear to Lydia like warnings or ciphers, and disembodied sounds whose sources she can’t seem to locate. If we’re going to be tethered to Lydia’s perspective, to the point of ignoring and suppressing entire chapters of her history, then we’re certainly going to remain tethered to her in the private moments when the fear and paranoia of changing social tides might make her wonder whether her time is up.

Field delays portraying Lydia at the conductor’s podium for an entire hour, but the wait is completely worthwhile.

What did Lydia actually do? Was it all that bad, and do her actions in the present — including apparent favoritism towards a young new female cellist — reflect something deeper about how she navigates the professional world? Before these topics are fully broached, Field finally turns his attention towards Lydia’s actual talents. He delays portraying her at the conductor’s podium for an entire hour, but the wait is completely worthwhile.

With her methods, her perspectives, and even some of her mysteries laid out before us, the film cuts abruptly — almost shockingly — to one of her rehearsals, as she sheds her calculating demeanor. Guðnadóttir’s booming (and appropriately cello-heavy) score replaces the soundtrack’s preceding eerie calm. A sudden warmth from cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister contrasts the first hour’s icy chill. Most vitally, we’re thrown headfirst into scenes of Lydia in her element (and Blanchett in hers), delivering a full-bodied commitment to sounds that resonate perfectly, and powerfully, off the auditorium walls. As she stops and restarts performances, she instructs her musicians in German; she speaks it elsewhere in the movie too each time with English subtitles, but during rehearsal scenes, the words are never captioned. It doesn’t matter. For those who don’t understand the language, she communicates with her winding posture, her waving arms, her expressive longing, as she tinkers and tries to draw out specific emotion from the music around her, which she can’t quite put into words.

It’s moving, and thrilling, but it complicates our own journey through the story. We should know better than to trust her, or even like her. But watching her perform — Lydia’s performance, as well as Blanchett’s — is an enrapturing experience. It’s hard not to revere what she creates.

With all these pieces in play, Field slowly unfurls a tale of backstage politics, and of stories about Lydia’s past slowly coming to light as she navigates her marriage and her professional life, and the sense of entitlement that rocks both these boats simultaneously. Field’s quieter moments are approached cautiously and deftly, and yet, unflinchingly, via still and lengthy takes that allow his performers to breathe complex life into every frame. However, his story is punctuated by moments of stark realization and of fearsome intensity, during which his camera charges into piercing closeups, forcing its way past Blanchett’s cold and manipulative (but ultimately alluring) exterior, and exposing the insecurities that feed Lydia’s egotism, and her very sense of being.

Surprisingly, much of what’s in the trailer doesn’t make the final cut, and while this is by no means news in and of itself, it hints at an even longer version of the film. It’s hard not to want to see it. As vast as TÁR may be, both in its runtime and in the emotional ground it covers, it’s so densely textured, and so richly performed, that one wonders how much more enormous it could possibly feel. That said, it also builds to one hell of a jaw-dropping ending that drips with dramatic irony, a sardonically funny punchline whose slow reveal is built upon the very self-image which Lydia has so carefully constructed — and which Field and Blanchett have so skillfully exposed over the course of the movie. It’s equally hard to ask for even a few more frames, when what we have is so downright effective from start to finish.