Before her personal and professional downfall, Lydia Tár occupied a hallowed slice of the cultural consciousness – a virtuoso pianist and vaunted maestro, protege of the great Leonard Bernstein, the first female conductor of the Berlin philharmonic, an EGOT winner and author of an acclaimed memoir. The type of singular and status-signaling cultural figure who commands the room at a New Yorker talk and basks in the glow of trailblazing achievements while shrugging off the weight of feminism (or the term “maestra”). Her success was, in her view, on artistic terms alone.
Tár is a fictional character, played superlatively by a career-best Cate Blanchett, but Todd Field’s film so specifically captures the trappings of highbrow celebrity, and so sublimely embeds in her cocooned world, that some viewers have not unreasonably mistaken her for a real person. She is of our current world, and from the first moments we meet her – filmed through someone’s phone on a private jet, interviewed by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, teaching a Juilliard masterclass – we inhabit hers: intense, exacting, narcissistic, fraying at the seams. (In a bold and fittingly pretentious move, the film plays the entire credits montage first.)
