CHICAGO — The new Cate Blanchett film “Tár” is no issue movie. It has, however, brought a lot of rarified and/or unfashionable issues back into the spotlight: symphony orchestra politics; the cost of obsessive artistic ambition and devotion to a calling; and, for writer-director Todd Field, the challenge and allure of creating a screen character testing our sympathies one minute, inspiring greatness the next.
“Tár” also simmers with topics of right there pertinence: #MeToo, for one, and for another, that suspiciously easy phrase “cancel culture” (or simply “canceled,” as a verb used against a transgressor, innocent or guilty). Set mostly in Berlin, the film recently expanded its nationwide release. Already, thanks to the late summer and early fall film festivals, it has entered the cultural conversation and post-screening arguments phase.
Selfishly, I wanted to sit down with someone watching and listening to “Tár” with a set of receptors different from mine. Enter music critic Hannah Edgar, a freelance writer for the Tribune. We met at a Lincoln Square cafe and talked gender bias, Blanchett’s stick technique, the details “Tár” got right and wrong — and “that crazy uppercut thing” Blanchett cooked up for her character, the beguiling and manipulative conductor Lydia Tár.
The following was edited from a longer conversation.
Hannah Edgar: On my second “Tár” viewing, at the Music Box Theatre, I saw it with a former professor of mine and his wife, who’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin. He’s a musicologist, and we all went with another musicologist, along with that musicologist’s husband, who’s not in any music-related field. We all had different vantage points. But for everyone, the movie worked.
Michael Phillips: Do you think it landed for you because you have so much knowledge about how music gets made, and how some of these personalities get molded? Or for other reasons?
Edgar: I think that’s really hard to disentangle. I suspect the movie would’ve been hugely affecting to me either way, but if you know something about that world, it can’t hurt! I have reservations about it, too. ... But the accuracy with which it portrays classical music actually astonished me. At one point I gasped out loud over a particular detail.
Phillips: Tell me more.
Edgar: It’s the scene where Lydia (Blanchett) and her partner, the concertmaster Sharon (Nina Hoss), are sitting on the lower concert hall balcony, and the camera’s over Lydia’s shoulder. The light catches Sharon’s neck, and — can you see here, where I have a bit of raised skin here on my neck? (Points to neck) It’s very slight. They gave her that, too, more prominently. Because it comes from playing the violin. I call it a violin hickey, but other people call it other things. That was shockingly right.
Also, the fact that many European orchestras, famously Berlin, are musician-governed — that came through in the scene when the players take a vote about the programming selection of (Edward Elgar’s cello concerto), and they’re tapping their music stands in approval. That would not happen in the United States. But in Berlin, it could. I will say, though, that Berlin has multiple concertmasters. It wouldn’t really have been only Sharon. The script implied that she was the concertmaster. Maybe there was a gross intervention by Lydia to make her the only one!
Phillips: A lot of movies are fastidiously researched, and you get these kinds of details. But it doesn’t necessarily help the end result. Do they truly affect the quality of the drama?
Edgar: You certainly don’t lose anything by getting these things right. Folks in the classical sphere, they’re used to seeing depictions of that world that are, by and large, laughable. So there’ll be a lot of eyes on this movie. It’s interesting timing, with two of the country’s major orchestras looking for a new music director, at the New York Philharmonic and here in Chicago. And here we have this drama about orchestra politics, and intrigue, and leadership, with a woman conductor as the lodestar for all of that.
Phillips: I’ve read some writers who took issue with the queer identity of the character, and who thought it was inherently a sort of maligning and wholly unsympathetic portrayal. Certainly Lydia Tár is egocentric, predatory. Field, right or wrong, keeps a lot of the narrative specifics off the table. Should one film be asked to take on the burden of “admirable representation”?
Edgar: That’s a big question. I had a lot of reservations when I heard about “Tár,” and then were largely dispelled when I saw it. It’d be one thing if (the film) made her a one-dimensional stereotype. But she’s one of the richest characters I’ve seen in a long time.
In a key scene there’s a depiction of a conducting student that was disturbing to me. (Lydia slyly mocks his musical tastes and dismissal of the Old Masters.) But the depiction of her, oddly enough, didn’t disturb me, because I agreed with a lot of what she was saying! It sets up who she is, and she sort of charmingly refers to herself as a “U-Haul lesbian.” I just found Lydia and Cate Blanchett remarkably convincing in the charisma department. Yet not for a moment does that diminish the horrendous things she does to the people around her.
I do think race has been an under-discussed aspect of “Tár,” though. That scene with the Juilliard student (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist as Max) features one of the few if not only actors of color with a substantial speaking role. He’s made out to be a ‘woke’ clown, who says he doesn’t like Bach; he’s a misogynist because he had 20 kids. Which is silly, especially when there are so many other composers out there to criticize.
He could criticize Wagner for his antisemitism. Or Beethoven and Berlioz, for their obsessive and frankly unhealthy fixations on women who didn’t return their affections. The “missed accusation” against Bach, if any — obliquely mentioned later in the film with respect to Mahler — is this theory that crops up again and again that some of his music was actually composed by his second wife, Anna Magdalena. By the way, one of the works claimed to be so is the “Well-Tempered Clavier” prelude Tár plays during said master class.
That theory is tenuous, at best. But at least it has legs in a way that accusing Bach of misogyny doesn’t — beyond what you’d expect from, you know, any 18th century dude. Instead, Todd Field made the decision to write it that way. It diminishes Max’s character.
Phillips: The one scene where we see Lydia and Sharon in a relatively tender interlude together, when they’re in their apartment —
Edgar: That weird Brutalist concrete-walled apartment! And she’s stealing Sharon’s meds and taking them with her on tour!
Phillips: Right. You never get a completely uncomplicated moment, or motive, with her. In that scene, when that great Neal Hefti/Count Basie tune, “Lil’ Darlin’,” comes on while they’re slow dancing, Lydia’s patting her back, keeping time, counting out the beat. A control freak, in public and private.
Edgar: And then she ends up being slightly off! Lydia says something like, “Let’s play something that’s 60 beats per minute. And Sharon says, “I think that’s 64, actually.” That scene plays into the cultural hierarchy of the whole movie, and the whole of Western classical music. Whenever they’re having their unwinding time, it’s jazz they play and jazz we hear. It’s implied that now, at last, they can turn off their brains.
Phillips: We don’t see Lydia in performance all that much. From your perspective: How’s Cate Blanchett’s stick technique as a screen conductor?
Edgar: Eh, it’s OK. (Laughs, takes out a baton) I actually brought my baton here. Blanchett breaks the character’s own rules all the time. Lydia says the stick hand keeps time, and the orchestra can’t start without her. But to me, Blanchett was conducting to the melody instead of signaling to the musicians how to play the melody. Her technique was a little more reactive.
On the other hand: I love that crazy uppercut thing she does to really get what she wants out of the orchestra, in the rehearsal scene, with Mahler’s Fifth. Not because it looks cool. But because I was convinced she was truly cueing the orchestra.
Phillips: We shouldn’t give too much away here, but the one astonished laugh the movie got out of me came when she literally tackles someone at the podium.
Edgar: Insane! That was insane, and I’m not sure that landed for me. Her tackling someone onstage made it so people (in the movie) had to believe what she was capable of, I guess. That made hers a fully public scandal. Because, let’s face it, because of the pedagogical structure of classical music, the industry abets an incredible amount of abuse behind closed doors. The character of Andris (an older male colleague and mentor of Lydia’s, played by Julian Glover), he’s going on about “Oh, Jimmy Levine, they crucified him.” There’s such a mentality of “I’ll believe the accusations of abuse when I actually see it.” But these things always happen behind closed doors, in conservatory spaces, practice rooms, backstage.
Phillips: I wonder, do you find the movie scold-y or thesis-driven?
Edgar: No! No. I hate some of the reductive takes on the film — that it’s a cancel-culture treatise, or that it’s saying that this is what happens when you elevate women; they’re just going to do the same things men do. But that’s reducing people to their demographic. “This film is about women abusing power, or men abusing power,” or whatever? No. It’s about how humans abuse power, and how power intoxicates.
It’s also a fabulous psychological portrait of the conductor. It doesn’t say, bluntly, this is who she is, period. It leaves things open. Everyone I know who’s seen “Tár” has come away with a different reading of it. And that’s the sign of a good film.
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