It's been a full 16 years since actor-turned-director Todd Field had a film out. The two indie features to his name (2001's In the Bedroom and 2006's Little Children), though lauded in their time, offer little to prepare one for his latest.
Tár is a bravura portrait of a celebrity conductor-composer – the eponymous Lydia Tár, a role custom-built for Cate Blanchett – coming undone, and it has appeared much as a reveille from a swoop of its maestro's conducting wand, cutting the silence suddenly and with unquestionable clarity of purpose. (It features prominently in the Oscar nominations, with six nods, including best actress for Cate Blanchett, and so continues to reverberate throughout awards season.)
What the film's purpose is, however, has been the subject of some debate. Is Tár an attack on 'cancel culture', more or less the force that knocks its namesake from her podium? Or is it an attack on the corrosive effects of institutional power? Is Lydia the villain of the piece, or the victim?
Right from the opening scene, in which Adam Gopnik plays himself in conversation with the fictive public figure for The New Yorker Festival, culturati will recognise the story-world as a high-quality dupe of the present day – a rarity in cinema, one of the slowest-moving art forms.
This vivid contemporaneity makes it tempting to read the film as Field's entry in the raging culture wars, or indeed, to mistake its subject – presented as being the first woman chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and an EGOT to boot – for a real person.
Although I would argue that Tár is not a polemic but a psychodrama, it's nevertheless true that the film is wilfully enigmatic – with its cloistered world of high-ceilinged halls and handsome modernist interiors; rooms in which industry politics are negotiated by way of the cool, coded exchange or sidelong glance.
In its cryptic temperament and several other ways it recalls Stanley Kubrick's erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut – which happens to feature a memorable turn from a young Field as Nick Nightingale, pianist-for-hire at the ultra-exclusive masked orgy.
Such was the suggestive power of Kubrick's symbolism that, since the film's release in 1999, shortly after the director's death, fans have scoured it for encrypted messages about real-world cabals, spawning all manner of cracked theories.
Tár too shivers with intrigue; the frame is haunted by a sense that malignant and potentially even spectral forces are at work – manifest in the disembodied scream that gives Lydia pause on a chilly morning park run, for instance, or the maze-like symbol inscribed in a book gifted anonymously to her, but also in such typically benign phenomena as a refrigerator's steady hum.
Field cuts the tension (as Kubrick did) with a sly but, once detected, almost silly humour – present in little touches like the redundant accent in Tár, or Lydia's too-adroit pronunciation of "Shipibo-Conibo", the Amazonian tribe amongst whom she did ethnographic fieldwork early in her career.
Discoursing about her (alleged) mentor Leonard Bernstein and the flourishes he brought to classic works, Gopnik asks Lydia, "Was he over-egging it?" Blanchett, for her part, is, ever so slightly – hinting at the fact that her character, despite a formidable career, still feels she has something to prove.
To the extent that Field, like Kubrick before him, can be said to be offering his viewers clues, they point not towards any unifying revelation of conspiracy so much as the psychological state of his protagonist: Increasingly as the film unfolds, Tár's world is tuned to an unsettled conscience. (That explains, if not necessarily merits, the theory that its latter third is all a dream. At least no one has found a way to link Lydia Tár to the Illuminati – yet.)
Lydia's fraying nerves – note the physical ticks, her heightened awareness to sound – are in part accounted for by the suicide of Krista Taylor, a one-time fellow of the foundation for aspiring women conductors that she co-founded. Her death brings to light accusations against the maestro of grooming – accusations that seem to be corroborated by the warped embraces glimpsed in Lydia's Francis Bacon-esque nightmares.
A self-described "U-Haul lesbian", Lydia is also apparently a serial seductress – not unlike her beloved Gustav Mahler, one of the great conductor-slash-composers, whose 5th symphony she is preparing her orchestra to record, having completed the other eight pre-pandemic.
Her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss, Phoenix), with whom she has a daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), is also the orchestra's first chair violin. Their relationship is a kind of loving, mutually beneficial alliance, and Sharon doesn't probe the hints that her partner has something on the boil with personal assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant, Portrait of a Lady on Fire), an aspiring conductor herself.
She is less tolerant, however, when Lydia moves to shake up the orchestra hierarchy in a bid for the affections of the new cellist (first-time actor Sophie Kauer, holding her own in the company of giants), a millennial Russian bohemian with a thing for Jacqueline du Pré – especially as allegations against Lydia are making headlines in the New York Post.
While Lydia Tár is no lowly Nick Nightingale type, both characters find themselves on the receiving end of lessons in hubris: Nick's comes from the top down, after spilling top secret orgy info; Lydia's is multi-directional, coming from below and within.
Her troubled sleep is not solely the telltale symptom of a guilty conscience: Even before mounting the stage for her New Yorker talk, no whiff of scandal yet on the air, she is twitchy, as if shaking off some monkey on her shoulder. Though she moves in public with an unmatched, imperious grace, in private Lydia Tár is, from the film's get-go, someone who seems to be losing her groove.
It is this slippage that accounts for the fact that the music in the film (almost entirely diegetic, with Tár's compositions underwritten by Hildur Gudnadóttir) is never quite permitted to take flight – always a hard cut or some in-scene disturbance, perhaps a knock at the door, intervenes; a recurring case of musicalis interruptus.
Though the film doesn't really call the genius of its lodestar into question, it does reveal that she has quashed certain parts of herself in the calculated course of her ascension. "You gotta sublimate yourself, your ego and, yes, your identity," Lydia reproaches a pangender Juilliard student who expresses disdain for a canon of old white dudes. "You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself."
These are words that come back to bite her. Perhaps it is only in the film's bombastic finale – a curveball, particularly if the film's humour has eluded you – that Lydia feels the brunt of her own advice.
Tár is in cinemas from January 26.
