An icy-hot paradox of a film, and one of the year’s peak achievements, writer-director Todd Field’s “Tár” casts a gimlet eye on a fictional American orchestra conductor and composer, Lydia Tár, at the summit of her global fame. The view is glorious. It’s also more treacherous than she realizes.
Cate Blanchett, for whom Lydia was written and the reason, Field acknowledges, the movie got made, goes to town and back again in this role. In the past, Blanchett often has added an extra 10% to a performance that takes it to 110%, as in her Oscar-winning turn in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” simply because she can.
In “Tár” it’s a different story. As written by Field and modulated, brilliantly, by Blanchett, Lydia becomes a rhapsody in contrasts, controlling, fastidious, witty, steely, imperious, hubristic. It’s a huge, showy role, and the beautiful paradox — one among many here — is that Blanchett has never been subtler.
We meet Lydia in the wings of the latest stage she’s about to conquer: A New Yorker Festival talk with Adam Gopnik, where they discuss her prized tutelage under the baton of “Lenny” Bernstein, her forthcoming memoir (“Tár on Tár”) and her newest conducting and recording project (spearheaded by Mahler’s Fifth Symphony). As a maestro she truly has arrived, now at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic.
In Berlin, she makes her home in a sleek Brutalist concrete-walled flat with her watchful partner, Sharon (Nina Hoss), and their daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). Sharon is the orchestra’s concertmaster, and we learn in passing about the demi-scandal their relationship caused at its outset.
Field’s screenplay drops a string of pearly, tantalizing details and clues throughout. One is purely visual, in that first scene: At the New Yorker talk, we see a woman, photographed obliquely, from the rear, at the back of the auditorium. Later we learn she is a former student and aspiring conductor who has been sidelined, abruptly, by Lydia after an apparent sexual relationship. The movie is about more than one thing. But among those other things, it’s about how an artist learns if not humility, then at least the price of hubris.
Not that he hasn’t tried — several projects were developed and then sputtered — but Field hasn’t made a film in 15 years. Now, with “Tár” joining his previous two features, “In the Bedroom” (2001) and “Little Children” (2006), it’d be a lousy deal for all of us if it took half that long for Field’s next one.
“Tár” may be a showcase for Blanchett, but it also creates vivid supporting acolytes, colleagues, friends-at-a-distance and fresh combatants for Lydia. There’s Francesca (Noémie Merlant of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), an ambiguously loyal assistant with thwarted conducting ambitions, who keeps an eagle eye on Lydia’s fangirls. There’s Lydia’s mentor Andris (Julian Glover) who, over lunch, acknowledges the winds of change, and the free-and-easy sexual predation in orchestral circles in the years before #MeToo. (At one point he refers to “Jimmy Levine” being, in his view, bullied into retirement and scandal by the ravages of cancel culture.) At that point in the story, Lydia knows she’s courting trouble herself.
The movie has an irresistible rubbernecking appeal, as Blanchett’s character finds herself drawn to a dazzling young cellist (Sophie Kauer) whom, with conspicuous speed, Lydia hires and then elevates. For the first time in her life, perhaps, Lydia is not the one in control of whatever may come of her new theoretical thrill. This shift in power dynamics gives the two-and-a-half-hour “Tár” somewhere to go. And while Field’s riding-for-a-fall narrative unfolds roughly how you’d expect, for a good while, there’s a nervy, imperfect but novelistically open-ended coda that defies a tidy finish. On the second viewing, I went with it. (It’s not a difficult film to see twice.)
Field knows what works in the way of short-term suspense, even if his detailing can get a mite heavy-handed. A crucial early scene finds Lydia squaring off against a nervous Julliard conducting student (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist), who uncontrollably bounces his leg up and down for the same reason, in a later sequence, Lydia’s timid, slightly musty Berlin assistant conductor (Allan Corduner) clicks his pen, impulsively, when talking to the maestro.
The biracial Julliard student, who identifies as pangender, makes the mistake of admitting he’s no champion of Bach, or Beethoven, and isn’t into white male Eurocentric composers of the old school. Lydia, who made her entire life and career on everything the student derides, cuts him down to size, brutally. “Don’t be so eager to be offended,” she seethes. “You must sublimate your ego and, yes, your identity” to the music at hand. As written and played, the lengthy classroom scene is, in itself, a master class.
The gray Berlin skies and a rich variety of interiors, as captured by cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, keep a visual/emotional lid on what is, in some respects, a juicy melodrama treated with unusual restraint. One of the few overripe lines in Field’s script has Lydia, in close physical consultation with her new cellist, noting that in rehearsal the violin section has a way of “getting caught up in the power of your glissando.”
Field pays close attention to detail, in what we hear as well as see. Lydia is hounded by unexplained sounds, from the apartment below the apartment she uses for work, to distant screams in a park, to a metronome with an apparent mind of its own.
Blanchett does it all here: Speaks three languages, plays piano, conducts with what looks to my untrained eye to be pretty fair stick technique, and changes the temperature in any given room Lydia enters with a glance. She keeps our sympathies and expectations in delicious flux. Not since Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood,” with its similarly daunting, dangling coda, has a portrait of a titanic, charismatic narcissist been guided so confidently by a skilled and intuitive technician going for broke, in careful increments. Another paradox!
The film reaches its visual zenith early (too early, maybe) in a sudden cut, shot from a striking low frontal angle, to Lydia marshaling her orchestral forces as she takes Mahler by the, ahem, podium and shows what she can do. How much can we overlook in an artist’s private life when they can make music like that? We’ll be asking that question indefinitely. Some audiences, I suppose, might find Lydia Tár forbidding — more of a rise-and-fall narrative trajectory than a fully dimensional protagonist-antagonist.
I am not that audience.
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‘TÁR’
4 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for some language and brief nudity)
Running time: 2:38
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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