The great crack-up of Lydia Tár, the Berlin Philharmonic’s entirely fictitious but docudramatically real-seeming chief conductor, has given the cinema its greatest spectacle, its greatest provocation and its greatest pleasure. If there is any justice, it will be producer-director Todd Field, with fellow producers Alexandra Milchan and Scott Lambert, who will be invited up on stage at the end of the evening to receive the climactic best picture statuette.
Cate Blanchett is wonderfully commanding as the haughty sociopath musical megastar, the monster who is disdainful of the philistinism and stupidity that surrounds her, the European-American exotic with the preposterous accent on the “A”. Blanchett also gives us something faintly preposterous, but seductive and intimidating in her speaking voice: resonant, deep, faintly nasal. She wears mannish black suits and white shirts with insouciant style and shakes her hair free with explosive abandon at the podium. At other moments, her face has a way of becoming a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.
Lydia is preparing a long-planned live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a project apparently delayed by the Covid lockdown, that is of overwhelming importance to her. But she has problems in her life. Her marriage to first violinist Sharon (Nina Hoss) is happy, but professionally fraught and when their daughter is bullied at school, Lydia shows us her sinister side by murmuring icy threats to the bully in the playground while assuring this little girl that it would be no use complaining to a grownup: “No one would believe you – I am a grownup” – thus revealing very clearly the abuser’s modus operandi.
Lydia’s assistant Francesca (played by Noémie Merlant) is a conducting student who has emerged through Lydia’s mentoring programme which may well exist simply to provide Lydia with submissive young lovers. Francesca is self-harmingly in love with Lydia and suspects that she is about to be jilted professionally and emotionally, having witnessed the catastrophic case of another student. And most calamitously, Lydia is persuaded to host a masterclass at New York’s Juilliard School at which she humiliates a student who identifies as Bipoc pangender for presuming to dismiss the supposed cis white misogyny of JS Bach. Lydia’s life begins to crumble and she (and we) begin to see how the walls are closing in.
Do we sympathise with Lydia or not? Does her terrible glamour reside in this conventional split between attraction and revulsion? Partly. The extended opening sequence might be seen as indulgent: the New Yorker’s cultural critic Adam Gopnik, playing himself, does a deferential interview with this imaginary creative legend. The New Yorker film writer, Richard Brody vehemently took against Tár for apparently endorsing regressive and reactionary attitudes.
But this opening scene very cleverly puts us inside the head of the superstar figure who has persuaded everyone to take her at her own estimation of herself, but whose moment-by-moment existence at achievement’s pinnacle means that there is no time, or space, left for enjoying anything.
And then there is the delicious, sensual chill of the film: the way its menace and anxiety has been refrigerated. From my very first viewing, I noticed its resemblance to Michael Haneke’s films, with its tropes of revenge surveillance and the cruelty of classical music. Film writer Geoff Andrew has pointed something else out: that its editor, Monika Willi, has worked on many Haneke movies and may herself have made (or persuaded Field to make) decisions about what to leave out, to create that sense of injury and denial.
The magnesium flare of excitement is what Field ignites here, and he does not flinch from scorching us with it. Tár has something harder and fiercer than either of his two previous films: In the Bedroom and Little Children which were far more emollient. Did the 16-year gap after Little Children incubate a steelier artistic vision? Either way, Tár is the film of the year.
