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Throughout the new film written and directed by Todd Field , its title character, a person of exceptionally sensitive hearing and possibly perfect pitch, is almost constantly distracted from her vital activities by extraneous noise. The noises include a doorbell, or something like a doorbell, dinging—our title character, Lydia Tár, almost absently reproduces its two notes on her piano after being ruffled by them—a metronome ticking, people pounding on doors, and more. And the noises are rendered via an audio design that is often disturbingly precise in its directional placement—we are as startled by them as Lydia is.

I was reminded of a recording made in the 1980s by the Dadaist sample-based music group Negativland, in which they bemoaned: “Is there any escape from noise?” In our world, as in the world of this film, as it happens, the answer is "No." Or perhaps “Not entirely.” Lydia Tár’s world—conjured with incredible agility and grace and mystery by Field in his first feature film in 16 years—is one in which the near-impossible escape is attempted via music. Specifically classical music, and more specifically classical music that aspires to sublimity.

Played with fierce and seamless commitment by Cate Blanchett , Lydia Tár is one of the wonders of the classical realm. She is a virtuoso pianist, an earnest ethnomusicologist, and a purposeful popularizer—she is apparently a member of the EGOT club, which isn’t a common achievement for a classical person. And as a protean conductor about to conclude recording a cycle of Mahler symphonies, Lydia needs to get away from noise to do the work to which she almost stridently commits herself.

Is applause noise? In the movie’s opening scene, a nervous Lydia walks out onto the stage of a concert hall to rapturous tribute. She’s not there to perform, but to be interviewed, as a feature of one of those culture festivals major metropolitan centers hold every so often. Her interviewer is New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who plays himself in a performance possibly lacking in self-awareness—the gleam in his eye as he interviews Lydia is one of an inveterate, serenely self-satisfied know-it-all. The exposition here sets Lydia’s cultural status in a kind of stone, so the viewer looks forward to a film that will show how the sausage, so to speak, is made.

Lydia is a busy person. She has a quiet, glum, efficient assistant named Francesca ( Noémie Merlant ) whom Lydia addresses with less warmth than most humans would apply to Siri or Alexa. Francesca watches from a distance as Lydia, in an advanced conducting seminar at Juilliard, passionately and profanely riffs against aspects of identity culture after one of her students proclaims with flat banal arrogance that as a queer BIPOC they can’t get with Bach, on account of the composer’s patriarchal lifestyle. As she prepares to leave New York for her base in Berlin, where she’ll be recording the last symphony in her Mahler cycle, the Fifth, she lunches with a fellow conductor, Elliot Kaplan ( Mark Strong ), who gossips with her like a peer but who clearly envies her. She tells him of her plans for the Berlin orchestra, including “rotating” an older colleague whose ear isn’t what it used to be.

The conductor also has a pursuer, or maybe more than one pursuer. We see the back of one’s head during the Gopnik interview. We see an iPhone screen recording Lydia and texting snarky comments to someone on the FaceTime call. She is not universally beloved.

Nor is she particularly lovable. On returning home, she upbraids her wife, Sharon ( Nina Hoss ) for keeping too many lights on in their elaborate, in sections bunker-like, Berlin apartment. Is Sharon subsidizing the power utility? There’s some business with Lydia hoarding pills that are supposed to belong to Sharon. The couple has a daughter, Petra; Lydia dotes on the little girl constantly, and late in the movie, as Lydia’s world is flying apart, Sharon (who is also the orchestra’s concertmaster, as it happens) notes that Lydia’s relationship with Petra is the only non-transactional one in her life.

And, in a sense, this is true. As an artist, she is a constant interrogator. This is the means by which she achieves what she considers the only worthwhile end: serving the composer. She has a slightly reactionary aesthetic. While Gopnik introduces her as a champion of female composers, including Julia Wolfe, she disses the Icelandic musician Anna Thorvaldsdottir as a sexy flash-in-the-pan guilty of what Lydia considers the greatest artistic crime, that of vague intentions. (All of the musicians referenced in the film, and there are a lot of them, are real; this is, among other things, a meticulously researched work.)

But as a person, she’s selfish by default and without hesitation. She serves Lydia Tár. And Lydia has a lot of appetites. In Berlin, she is knocked sideways by news of the suicide of a former protégé. And even as she’s trying to cover her tracks in this affair, erasing emails and pressing Francesca to do same, Lydia sets her sights on Olga ( Sophie Kauer ) a promising young cellist, playing games with senior orchestra members to promote the rookie. Who is, as an audition scene takes pains to convey, a superb player. But still. The look Lydia gives Olga at their first lunch is almost literally wolfish.

“TÁR” is that rarest of items: a prestige awards contender that’s also a genuine art film. The narrative unspools in an insinuating, sometimes enigmatic way; Field is quite a distance from the bluntness of his last feature, 2006’s “ Little Children .” Certain shots and sequences show compositional affinities with Stanley Kubrick (for whom Field worked, as an actor, in 1999’s “ Eyes Wide Shut ,” Kubrick’s final film) and Tarkovsky. But the formal virtuosity on display here is in a quieter register than in many other such films. That’s true for the note-perfect acting as well.

Much has already been written about how the film’s narrative draws from emerging stories of abusive and exploitative behavior by powerful people in the arts. Are the sublime aspirations and achievements of a Lydia Tár vitiated by her problem-person behavior, or is she finally In The Right Anyway? As it happens, Field’s film is almost equally skeptical of the culture from which a figure like Tár arose as it is of the contemporary strain in culture that seeks to debunk her. In the end, "TÁR" is not a diatribe or parable, but an interrogation, one that seeks to draw the viewers in, and compel them to consider their own place in the question.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 7th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Rated R for some language and brief nudity.

158 minutes

Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár

Nina Hoss as Sharon Goodnow

Noémie Merlant as Francesca Lentini

Mark Strong as Eliot Kaplan

Julian Glover as Andris Davis

Allan Corduner as Sebastian Goodnow

Sophie Kauer as Olga Metkina

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Cinematographer

Florian Hoffmeister
Monika Willi
Hildur Guðnadóttir

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Review: Cate Blanchett is at the peak of her powers in ‘Tár,’ a magnificent cinematic symphony

A woman in black tails conducts with a baton in the movie "Tar."

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It’s not until an hour into “Tár” that we see the title character — a classical conductor known the world over as Lydia Tár and played by an unimprovable Cate Blanchett — do what she was born to do. It’s an astonishing performance nestled inside another: In one shot, Lydia towers like a colossus over the podium and the camera, her face visible only to the musicians seated off-screen, her arms spread wide as if she were embracing or perhaps possessing the world. Classical music buffs, who will have a particular field day with this movie, will also have sharper observations than mine on the merits of Blanchett’s posture and baton technique. But this actor doesn’t even need to lift a baton, or approach a podium, to make us feel we’re in the presence of a singularly gifted musical body and mind.

A lesser movie — and one of the weird pleasures of “Tár” is that you can’t stop imagining the lesser movie it so easily might have been — would have introduced Lydia in full-blown maestro mode, so as to convince us of her genius at the outset. But writer-director Todd Field takes that genius as a given and trusts we’ll do the same; he respects the intelligence of the audience as surely as he does the magnificence of his star. And that respect is clear from the long, teasing reveal of an opening sequence: an onstage Q&A moderated by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (playing himself) that ushers us, with tasteful chuckles and radio-smooth applause, into Lydia’s rarefied cultural sphere.

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Gopnik rattles off an impressively varied (and deftly expository) list of Lydia’s professional accomplishments: not just all the prestigious orchestras she’s conducted but also the honors she’s received as a pianist, a composer, a teacher, an author, a scholar of Peruvian Indigenous music and a rare overachiever whose work straddles music, television, movies and theater. (Yes, she’s an EGOT winner .)

For the record:

11:50 a.m. Oct. 7, 2022 An earlier version of this review incorrectly gave conductor Nadia Boulanger’s name as Natalia.

Lydia, casually resplendent in a simple black suit and open-necked white shirt, takes a moment to register all this praise before gently deflecting it. She describes her love for her heroes like Mahler and Leonard Bernstein, and she positions herself in a small, proud tradition of female conductors, including Nadia Boulanger and Antonia Brico. There’s a ticklish note of meta-pleasure to Blanchett’s performance: She may be playing the role of the conductor with impeccable poise, but so, of course, is Lydia herself.

The ability to perform greatness is itself a key component of greatness, as this pretty great movie knows. So is the illusion of approachability: In her self-deprecating asides and post-Q&A chitchat, Lydia extends the audience-flattering notion that we could even begin to understand what she does. She can describe, with breathtaking precision and self-assurance, the beauty of a composition or the methodology behind her hand movements. But what distinguishes “Tár” from so many good and bad movies about artists is its understanding that what we tidily refer to as genius — call it some elusive distillation of star quality, technical skill, intellectual acumen and pure, nervy instinct — can never truly be known, let alone filmed. It can only really be imagined.

And now Field, bringing a 16-year absence from filmmaking to a well-deserved end, has imagined Lydia’s inner and outer worlds with a clarity and rigor that makes 158 minutes fly by like a dream. If “time is the essential piece of interpretation,” as Lydia claims early on, then this filmmaker’s own mastery of cinematic time is worth singling out. So, for that matter, are the cool, somber precision of Florian Hoffmeister’s images, the fluidity of Monika Willi’s editing and the sleek, luxurious chill of Marco Bittner Rosser’s production design. If there’s a reason this movie flows so absorbingly, even with its decidedly andante pacing, it may be that Field’s storytelling draws no artificial distinction between the big and the small, the important and the mundane; everything we see and hear matters. And because each moment serves at least two purposes — “Tár” is both a superb character study and a highly persuasive piece of world building — you may well find yourself marveling at Field’s economy.

If there’s a governing logic to the story, it’s that in nearly every scene, Lydia is performing, and in every performance, she’ll reveal something she didn’t necessarily intend. That’s true whether she’s having an obligatory drink with a deep-pocketed investor (an oily Mark Strong) or teaching at Juilliard, where she cruelly humiliates a student, Max (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist), in a virtuoso extended monologue. Lydia’s performing doesn’t end when she leaves New York and returns home to Germany, where she serves as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic — another role she plays with note-perfect skill, captivating her colleagues and underlings with her dry, affable wit and unyielding authority.

For if Lydia is always performing, then she is also always conducting, ruthlessly directing, coordinating, manipulating and sometimes hushing the people in her life as if they were members of her own personal orchestra. Some of them, like Lydia’s bumbling assistant conductor (Allan Corduner) and aging, long-retired mentor (Julian Glover), are granted a brief, beautifully performed solo.

The most poignant of these comes from Sharon (the superb Nina Hoss), the orchestra’s first-chair violinist and Lydia’s longtime partner, with whom she shares a gorgeously cavernous apartment and a young daughter. Hoss, whose quiet, sympathetic gaze can register even the subtlest shifts in emotional temperature, here sublimates her star persona in much the same way that Sharon represses her own needs. She knows the emotional sacrifices she’s made to live with — and nurture — a celebrity.

That means turning a blind eye to some of Lydia’s less savory secrets, the concealment of which largely falls to an ambitious personal assistant, Francesca (a cunning Noémie Merlant, from “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” ). The details of Lydia’s indiscretions are left ambiguous, but the conclusions we can draw from them are almost banally matter-of-fact. As various lovely young women slip on and off Lydia’s radar — a conducting student she’s abruptly ghosted, a prodigiously talented Russian cellist (Sophie Kauer) — “Tár” becomes a coolly modulated study in the abuse of power and the predatory impulses of the famous and influential, even in an era when emails, Wikipedia entries and TikTok videos carry ever greater threats of public exposure.

Lydia, with her deep reverence for centuries-old musical traditions, is predictably oblivious to these modern technological pitfalls and blindsided by the looming prospect of her own comeuppance. But in other respects, she is an extraordinarily perceptive instrument. Blanchett emphasizes Lydia’s acute sensitivity to sound, whether she’s hushing someone’s nervous physical tic or picking up on eerie disturbances in her apartment late at night. Is someone stalking her and her family, or is her guilt at her past misdeeds finally catching up with her? “Tár” isn’t a horror movie, exactly, but at times its unnerving psychological tension reminded me of the chilly, often Schubert-rich films of Michael Haneke (particularly “The Piano Teacher” ), who likes to lay bare the moral cowardice and guilty desires often lurking beneath lives of upper-middle-class privilege.

Field may not be as exacting a formalist or as rigorous a sadist as Haneke, but as he demonstrated in his previous dramas, “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children,” he has his own flair for jolting his characters out of their complacency. In “Tár,” Lydia is partly undone by her defiance of the shifting cultural winds in the overlapping spheres of music, industry and academia she occupies. As a rare woman and a rare lesbian in a male-dominated profession, she’s undoubtedly a trailblazer, though like so many well-established figureheads, she’s also an ardent defender of the status quo. She sneers at diversity initiatives, downplays gender barriers and insists that identity politics — what she calls “the narcissism of small differences” — have no place in the evaluation of art.

A woman holds a garment bag while in an elevator in the movie "Tár."

“Don’t be so quick to be offended,” she lectures that student, Max, who expresses distaste for the legacies of Bach, Beethoven and other canonized white male composers. And whether you see Lydia as some sort of brave antiwoke crusader or out-of-touch reactionary, Blanchett makes it hard not to savor the ruthlessness — or the dazzling intellectual brio — with which she dismantles Max’s position (all while playing the opening prelude of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” to boot).

But if “Tár” pokes at a few discourse-friendly thought bubbles like “#MeToo” and “cancel culture” — and drops a few knowing references to disgraced musicians like Plácido Domingo and James Levine — it’s much too smart and slippery to be reduced to them. Rejecting the comforts of moral absolutism and easy outrage, Field holds Lydia Tár the magnificent artist and Lydia Tár the monstrous human being side by side — and insists that the two might, in fact, be inextricably, even symbiotically connected.

Great art thrives, we’re often told, on the transgression of boundaries, moral as well as aesthetic. While Lydia gets called a lot of nasty names, “f—ing bitch” included, it’s telling that her own favorite insult is “robot,” as if a rule-minding automaton, or a human metronome, were the worst thing a person could be. What makes “Tár” so bracingly honest is the extent to which it agrees with her. Its tone, coolly understated but not exactly neutral, leaves room for exasperation and admiration alike. This may be a morality play about a powerful woman’s downfall, but there is something about Field and Blanchett’s refusal to abandon Lydia at her lowest ebb that subverts the usual dramatic apparatus of crime and punishment.

The movie’s ending is both darkly funny and disquietingly ambiguous, not because of any real confusion as to what’s happening but because it refuses to instruct us how we should feel about it. My own awe at Lydia Tár — and as loathsome as she is, I haven’t loved many movie characters more this year — inclines me toward the more optimistic of two possible readings. I also can’t shake the conviction that, the depths of her corruption and cruelty notwithstanding, she bears the unmistakable joint imprint of the two geniuses who breathed her into being. Lydia is and always has been a tirelessly prolific and inventive artist, a giant of the medium that chose her. And she may also, against considerable odds, have a triumphant return up her sleeve.

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Rating: R, for some language and brief nudity Running time: 2 hours, 38 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 7, AMC the Grove, Los Angeles; AMC Century City

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘Tár’ Review: Cate Blanchett Acts With Ferocious Force in Todd Field’s Masterful Drama

The actor creates a study in power, passion, and entitlement in a movie so real it's immersive.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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“Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field , tells the story of a world-famous symphony orchestra conductor played by Cate Blanchett , and let me say right up front: It’s the work of a master filmmaker. That’s not a total surprise. Field has made only two previous films, and the first of them, the domestic revenge drama “In the Bedroom” (2001), was languorous and lacerating — a small, compact indie-world explosion. His second feature, “Little Children” (2006), was a misfire, though his talent was all over it.

Blanchett, in a performance that’s destined to make her a major presence in this year’s awards season, plays Lydia Tár, one of the most celebrated conductors of her time. The film opens with an enigmatic shot of a text-message exchange, which will gradually pierce us as its meaning comes to light. It then goes into an extended sequence where Lydia is interviewed onstage by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker (playing himself), which allows us to discover who she is and to revel in the caginess of her cultivated stardom. Lydia, we learn, has been the conductor of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic (among other prestige posts), and for seven years she has led the Berlin Philharmonic. She’s an EGOT winner, and her mentor was Leonard Bernstein, who pioneered the role of the American conductor as larger-than-life figure. Lydia, like Lenny, possesses powers of articulation that rival her musical skills.

Blanchett’s performance first strikes us as a tad theatrical; she almost seems to be reciting the lines. But what we realize is that Lydia herself is giving a performance, pitching her persona to the New York swells, stitching together pensées and anecdotes she has told dozens of times. Offstage, she’s as fiery and spontaneous as she was fake-spontaneous in the interview, as we see her in assorted encounters, like a gossipy lunch with Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong), the nerdish investment banker and part-time conductor with whom she founded the Accordian fellowship, an organization devoted to the cultivating and placing of aspiring young women conductors, or the quippy back-and-forth she enjoys with Francesca (Noémie Merlant), her comely and recessive assistant, who multitasks as devotedly as if Lydia were a high-maintenance studio executive.

One of the fascinations of “Tár” is its portrait of Lydia as a highbrow paragon who has created herself as a kind of brand. She’s a passionate scholar who lives and breathes the scores she’s conducting. She’s an ardent teacher, who in one exhilarating sequence leads a master class at Juilliard with a whiplash provocation designed to slice through the pieties — about atonal music and identity politics — that, in her opinion, have blunted the students’ sense of possibility. She’s a global celebrity who understands that conducting is a dictatorship, something she enforces within the democratic-socialist protocols that supposedly rule the Berlin orchestra. She’s a technologist of recordings, micromanaging the nuances of how her albums are made (right down to the pose on the cover photos), and an author as well, about to publicize a coffee-table book called “Tár on Tár.” And she is, in effect, a CEO, enmeshed in the office politics of managing the symphony personnel, organizing benefit concerts, constructing a fearsome global reach that’s the cornerstone of her mystique.

In this scene and so many others, Field’s script is dazzling in its conversational flow, its insider dexterity, its perception of how power in the world actually works. He creates such an elaborately enticing portrait of Lydia Tár as a public figure that when she travels back to Berlin and walks into her impossibly luxe designer home, it comes as a slight shock to realize that she also has a personal life. She is married, to the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic (played by the radiantly sane-tempered Nina Hoss), and they have a young daughter, Petra, who Lydia, amusingly, rescues from a mean-girl situation at school by speaking to the young bully in question with such a perfect terrorist threat (“I am Petra’s father…I am going to get you”) that you realize she can master the politics of any situation. Except for one.

In “Tár,” Todd Field enmeshes us in a tautly unfolding narrative of quiet duplicity, corporate intrigue, and — ultimately — erotic obsession. Yet he does it so organically that for a while you don’t even realize you’re watching a “story.” But that’s what a great story is. It doesn’t hit you over the head with telegraphed arcs. It sneaks up on you, the way that life does. Field, working with the cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, has shot “Tár” so that it looks like a documentary directed by Stanley Kubrick (who Field worked with on “Eyes Wide Shut,” back when he was an actor). The compositions are naturalistic in an imposing, ice-cool way, and what they express is the casual calculation with which Lydia monitors every facet of her existence. Her personal life, artistic career, and highly charged, verbally domineering personality are all in such powerful sync that we can’t imagine how anything could upset this apple cart.

Yet there’s one aspect of Lydia’s life that she understandably keeps on the down-low: the women she has flings with on the side. She is, in her way, a not untypical celebrity, treating sexual indulgence as something she has the license to do. In this case, part of the flavor of it emerges from the classical-music world, which has had more than its share of philanderers and predators. The reason for that, Field suggests, is that there’s something about the exalted nature of this music that leads the people who live everyday within its heady majesty to feel as if pleasure, in every realm, is their divine right.

There is also a foreshadowing glimpse, in the audience at the New Yorker interview, of a woman we see only from behind — a redhead named Krista, 25 years old and one of the Accordian fellows, who Lydia enjoyed a brief intense relationship with, until it became clear that Krista was fixated on her in a compulsive and unstable way. Lydia not only cut her loose; she campaigned, in private, against her landing a conducting position with an orchestra. But Krista can’t let go — of Lydia or of her own demons. And this is the wrong era for that to happen in.

“Tár” has been constructed ingeniously, so that the various situations Lydia is dealing with in the orchestra — like her scheme to get rid of Sebastian (Allan Corduner), the old mule of an assistant conductor — interlock in unexpected ways. Lydia cuts Sebastian loose with icy efficiency, but that means Francesca thinks it’s her time to step up and occupy the assistant-conductor slot. Lydia, however, decrees that it’s not the time. And that’s a big mistake. She’s counting on the loyalty of Francesca to get rid of the desperate, telltale email messages Krista has been sending to the two of them. Why the two of them? Because this fling was a lot more sensually complicated than other office flings.

The movie starts off as the chronicle of a magnetic, brilliant, difficult artist navigating a sea of career drama. Then, just like that, it evolves into another kind of movie — a study in what can happen when social media, the death of privacy, and a merciless new public morality conspire to hold someone, in all their flaws (including some rather monstrous ones), up to the light. Lydia rides high, only to confront the rapid spectacle of her downfall. Which is riveting, in a Greek-tragedy-in-the-age-of-YouTube-and-the-New-York-Post sort of way. There’s a moment near the end that rivals the Jackson-Maine-peeing-at-the-Grammys scene in the 2018 “A Star Is Born” for sheer jaw-dropping wowness.

Yet “Tár” also raises a fundamental question, one that will be discussed and debated with singular intensity as the movie gets released in October and then heads into awards season. That question is: Where does the film stand on the issue of what happens to Lydia? I would say that it shows her, very much, to be a predatory soul (and she herself comes face-to-face with that reality in a scene where she tries to get a massage in Thailand). Yet she is also a great artist. You could say, and I would, that the film strikes a note of ambivalence, but in a haunting sense the final judgment offered by “Tár” is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We’re in a new world. One where people wear masks. And where the power of the sublime no longer holds sway.

Reviewed at Dolby 88 (Venice Film Festival), Aug. 22, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 158 MIN.

Production: A Focus Features release of a Standard Film Company, EMJAG Productions release. Producers: Todd Field, Scott Lambert, Alexandra Milchan. Executive producers: Cate Blanchett, Nigel Wooll.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Todd Field. Camera: Florian Hoffmeister. Editor: Monika Willi. Music: Hildur Guonadóttir.
With: Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Mark Strong, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, Sylvia Flote.

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Movie Reviews

In 'tár,' a brilliant but manipulative conductor orchestrates everyone around her.

Justin Chang

Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor in the film Tár. Courtesy of Focus Features hide caption

Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor in the film Tár.

By this point, we don't need any reminders of what a great actor Cate Blanchett is, but we have one anyway in her new movie, Tár . To play the fictional role of Lydia Tár, world-renowned conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Blanchett learned to conduct music, play the piano and speak German — not all at once, thankfully, though I'm sure she could if called upon to do so. A lot of movies about artists — even real-life artists — have a hard time convincing you of their characters' accomplishments. But Blanchett makes you believe in Lydia's genius immediately, before we've even seen her pick up a baton.

The movie begins in Manhattan, with Lydia in a lengthy onstage conversation with the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. This scene and others are a feast for classical music buffs: We learn about all the orchestras Lydia's conducted, the music she's composed, the films she's scored, the books she's written and the many awards she's won. We also learn about her devotion to great composers like Mahler and great conductors like Leonard Bernstein , and about her thoughts on how conductors shape and manipulate the flow of time.

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Cate blanchett finds humor in the painfully absurd.

The writer-director Todd Field has a masterful understanding of time himself. Tár runs more than 2 1/2 hours, but I found it mesmerizing — not just as a character study, but as a thoroughly persuasive portrait of the insular and competitive world where Lydia holds sway. While her work often brings her to New York — she teaches at Juilliard — she makes her home in Berlin with her partner, Sharon, an accomplished violinist played by the superb German actor Nina Hoss. They have a young daughter, though Lydia is too consumed with work to have much family time.

Lydia isn't just a conductor at the podium; she treats everyone in her life as if they were a member of her own personal orchestra, to be manipulated at will. That goes for the wealthy investor — a terrifically oily Mark Strong — who's funding a conducting fellowship, and also her hard-working assistant, Francesca, who aspires to be a conductor herself . Francesca, played in a cunning turn by Noémie Merlant, also keeps her boss' less savory secrets, some of them involving the many attractive young female musicians Lydia's taken under her wing. That makes Tár a chilly study in the abuse of power, set in a classical music industry that has seen some of its biggest stars face accusations of sexual misconduct.

Lydia may be the rare woman — and the rare lesbian — to have achieved global fame in a male-dominated profession, but she also enforces a certain status quo. She waves aside the idea that gender barriers have ever held her back. And there's an extraordinary early scene at Juilliard, where Lydia argues with a young student of color who scorns Bach, Beethoven and other white male composers. Lydia rejects his wholesale dismissal of the Western canon and insists that identity politics should have no place in the evaluation of art. You can agree or disagree with her, but it's hard not to admire the intellectual brio with which she attacks her student's argument — all while playing the opening prelude of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" on the piano, to boot.

It's been a long 16 years since Field made a movie, and for at least some of that time, he's clearly been thinking about some of the most hotly debated social issues of the day. But Tár is too subtly thoughtful and complex to be reduced to mere talking points, and Blanchett's performance also resists easy categorization. With her mix of charisma, ferocity and occasional tenderness, she shows us both Lydia Tár the magnificent artist and Lydia Tár the monstrous human being — and makes it impossible for us to separate the two.

Lydia is due for a comeuppance, and she gets it. Or does she? A lot of people I've spoken to about Tár were thrown off by the ending, even those who love the movie as much as I do. I won't reveal that ending, except to say that it filled me with a fresh wave of admiration — for Lydia, a consummate artist even at her lowest, and for the brilliantly thought-provoking movie that brought her to life.

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Venice Review: In <i>Tár,</i> Cate Blanchett Gives a Dazzling Performance as an Orchestra Conductor on the Edge

Venice Review: In Tár, Cate Blanchett Gives a Dazzling Performance as an Orchestra Conductor on the Edge

A s many a printed tote bag reminds us, well-behaved women rarely make history. But what does that mean, exactly? There’s a tendency to romanticize the idea of the complicated woman, as if that adjective were an automatic badge of honor. Does it mean a woman is intelligent, independent or brave? Or is she merely unbearable? And what man ever gets praised for being “complicated”?

In writer-director Todd Field’s dazzling, uncompromising high-wire act Tár —playing at the 79 Venice Film Festival— Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, a conductor at the top of her game, and of her world. We don’t see her struggling to be the best, or complaining about how hard it is to be recognized in a field dominated by men. In fact, she believes women conductors have no reason to complain about disadvantage or discrimination. While men often use money and power to fuel their sense of entitlement, Lydia stakes her claim on her own intelligence. She takes what she wants from people and leaves scorched earth behind. She’s great and awful in equal measure, so compelling you can’t turn away from her, but also touching in a way that never courts our pity. She’s unlike anyone we’ve ever seen onscreen, which may help explain why this is only Field’s third movie as a director, even though he has worked steadily through the years as an actor: he’s obviously a guy who waits for the right one to come along.

Read more: The 52 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2022

Tár, Field’s first film in 16 years, is extraordinary. It’s also, in places, disconcertingly chilly and remote, possibly the kind of movie that’s easier to love than it is to like. But people will surely be talking about it, and about Blanchett’s performance specifically. Blanchett, though extremely gifted, can be excessively mannered. (Her 2014 Oscar-winning role in Blue Jasmine is Exhibit A; she hits each Blanche du Bois-inflected note with tuning-fork precision.) But she can also be a performer of great, near-alien strangeness and beauty, and that’s the subterranean current she’s tapping as Lydia Tár. This is a willful, charismatic performance, stubborn and elegant as a vine.

When it comes to telling us who Lydia is and what she’s about, Field and Blanchett throw us into the deep end without even asking if we can swim. As the movie begins, we see Lydia prepping for an onstage discussion in New York. She’s turned out in supple, androgynous custom-made goods that seem to float on her body; she busies herself with breathing exercises as she waits in the wings. She’s all about preparation, which is a kind of control; with a sturdy diaphragm, you can conquer the world.

The New Yorker ’s Adam Gopnik, playing himself, introduces her to the audience by reciting a seemingly endless list of her accomplishments: She’s the first woman to have been appointed principal conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker. She’s nearly as well respected a composer as she is a conductor. And her soon-to-be-published memoir has the kind of look-at-me title Norman Mailer would have envied: Tár on Tár . Lydia deflects Gopnik’s fawning praise with withering modesty, and as the predictable Q&A-type questions start piling up, her answers race ahead, moving on multiple planes like dueling Double Dutch jump ropes, parabolas wriggling over and under one another like unmappable brain waves. She speaks of her idols, Bernstein and Mahler—she’s preparing a performance of the latter’s Symphony No. 5 in Berlin. She scoffs at the idea that women conductors need to be referred to by the special, feminized form maestra. (“They don’t call astronauts astronettes ,” she says with a wan smile.) She rails against the perception of a conductor as a human metronome, but then doubles back to embrace it: “Time’s the thing,” she says, the essential component of interpretation. This is Blanchett performing as a performer, being excessive on purpose, swaggering in her own house of mirrors.

In addition to a great, prestigious job, Lydia has what would seem to be an exquisitely curated home life. She lives in Berlin with her partner, Sharon (played by the great German actor Nina Hoss, whose name, if there were justice in the world, would be as big as Blanchett’s), and their grade-school-age daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who’s not as well-adjusted as she might be. The suggestion—and the reality—is that Lydia is so busy being Lydia Tár that she’s dropping the ball at home. But out in the world, she’s greatly in demand as an inspirational figure, and she lets no one off the hook. We see her giving a master class at Juilliard, and she thinks nothing of setting one kid straight when they explain that, “as a BIPOC, pan-gender person,” they fail to find much to respond to in a dead cis white male like Bach. Lydia is exasperated by that response, and says as much, in a highly undiplomatic way—but she also sits at the piano, with the student at her side, and eagerly runs through a few brief passages, as if to cut a path through the students’ collective dismissiveness. Bach, she explains as she spins out a phrase with a question mark built right in, “is never certain of anything.” She strives to counteract the reductive thinking that’s been programmed into these young people: “Don’t be so eager to be offended.”

But being on top of the world comes with its temptations, and it soon becomes clear that Lydia’s sexual indiscretions may not be the forgivable kind: she has used her influence not only to seduce others, but to hurt them. Lydia is gay—she describes herself cavalierly as a “U-Haul lesbian,” whatever that might mean—though it’s hard to conceive of her as a sexual being: she’s so brainy, so exacting, so in love with the notion of drawing magic out of thin air in the form of music, that there doesn’t seem to be room for a libido. But those who are close to her—like her ambitious assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who aspires to be a conductor herself, and her partner Sharon, who is also first violinist in her orchestra, and the first to notice when Lydia’s eye starts roving—have seen how successful a manipulator she is. The movie makes no excuses for Lydia’s behavior, and Blanchett’s performance faces it squarely. Lydia is a woman who believes she can control everything around her, as if her ability to wrangle notes as they float through the air has turned her into a god, a being of great power and vengefulness.

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‘Tár’: Cate Blanchett’s Staggering Work of Complicated Genius

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

But she needs an image for the cover. Tár’s Mahler run is going to be released as a digital box set by Deutsche-Grammophon, the prestigious label whose album covers are surely among the most iconic, recognizable images in classical music, powerful assertions of musicians — conductors and soloists and small ensembles — as larger-than-life auteurs, with faces and names on par with the legendary composers that they’re playing. The occasion of a career-capping Mahler set calls for a statement piece. Tár’s instinct, in designing that image, is to look to the past.

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The past is catching up with Tár. Or, more accurately, she’s being subjected to the present: She’s gotten away with things throughout her career that she shouldn’t have. How bad they are, how worthy they are of condemnation, how much Tár deserves what comes to her in this film — these prove subjective. Fields is not in it for the easy schadenfreude, either way. Nor is Blanchett, who, more than anything else at play, is the essence of what makes Tár work. It’s a masterful, full-bodied performance — even her way with the angularity of her face and the camera feels thought-through — and even more impressively, it’s great, delicious fun. Blanchett accomplishes the primary and most immediate task of convincing us that Tár is, indeed, worth all the fuss — that she is a genius of a kind and also the kind of unabashed top that can lead femmes to their emotional peril, that her way of sculpting time through the air with her hands as she conducts has genuine authority, that her insights into music are bone-deep, that she has the wit, intelligence, and importantly, the furtiveness and hard-to-place sexual charisma to draw the flies like honey, to everyone’s severe detriment. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Tár is that it is far more than a mere vehicle for one showboating performance. And even if it were, with a performance like this, who would mind?

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Baton Charge

By Anthony Lane

What do you mean, you’ve never heard of Lydia Tár? Come on, you must know her. She was a protégée of Bernstein’s. She’s the one who conducted orchestras in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York before taking charge of the Berlin Philharmonic. She has a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy—the royal flush of accolades. It’s true that she happens to be a fictional character, incarnated by Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s new movie, “Tár,” but that is a footling detail. This woman is alive, ominously articulate, crisply styled, and all too present. She burns like a cool flame.

When we first meet Lydia, she’s about to be interviewed onstage, in New York, by my colleague Adam Gopnik , who is persuasively played, in an audacious stroke of casting, by himself. (One presumes that Robert Pattinson was unavailable.) Questioned about her art, Lydia launches into an impassioned riff on the nature of musical time; asked about gender, she names various trailblazers who took to the podium before her but seems otherwise unconcerned with couching her achievement in strictly feminist terms. Her trail is her own.

Not long afterward, in a less genial scene, Lydia bumps into identity politics head on. During a class that she’s giving to would-be conductors at Juilliard, one of them claims, “as a BIPOC pangender person,” not to be “into Bach,” who is very dead and very white and had the patriarchal nerve to father twenty children. Lydia strikes back. According to taste, you will either cheer her majestic gutting of twenty-first-century self-regard, and her stout defense of high aesthetic principles, or agree with the student that she’s “a fucking bitch.” But wait. The battle lines between such opposing points of view, Field suggests, may not be as clear as all that, and, over two hours and forty minutes, the war grows very messy indeed.

Lydia, who calls herself “a U-Haul lesbian,” lives in Berlin with her partner, Sharon (Nina Hoss), the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic. In a movie short on tenderness, it’s a rare joy to watch them dance together to Count Basie. The couple have an adopted daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who is obviously close to Lydia’s heart. But not that close. The strongest venting of parental emotion that we witness is not a hug but a funny and frightening sequence in which Lydia crosses the school playground, confronts a kid who’s been bullying Petra, and tells her, mezzo piano, “I’ll get you.” The urge to protect becomes a tigerish threat. What Blanchett captures so well in Lydia are the moments when decisiveness stiffens into ferocity. Her virtues, like her formidable gifts, have claws, and, as with anyone whose professional mission is to take command of others, you can’t help wondering what will befall her if, for one reason or another, she loses command of herself.

Here come the reasons. Through glimpses of e-mails, passing chatter, and scraps of dreams, we learn of a young trainee conductor who was fixated on Lydia (or was it vice versa?), and whose career Lydia has since attempted to block. There are hints of a pattern—of other young women who have slipped under Lydia’s spell and suffered accordingly. Her personal assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), is a guarded and dedicated soul, who receives scant reward for her devotions; was she, too, once an object of Lydia’s interest? Rumors abound, a legal deposition is required, and Lydia is Tárred and feathered on social media. When she travels to New York, in the company of a Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer), we see a snap of them, on Twitter, plus the tagline “TÁR’s fresh meat.”

Most of the movie is set in the fortress of serious classical music, on the loftiest levels, where the stars take private jets. Your grip, as a viewer, will probably be more secure if you know what free bowing means, and who Thomas Beecham was, and what DG and MTT stand for (Deutsche Grammophon and Michael Tilson Thomas, respectively). And for those of us who have never quite understood what an assistant conductor does, “Tár” supplies the answer, in the old-school shape of Sebastian (Allan Corduner). After a rehearsal of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which will soon be recorded live, Sebastian presents Lydia with a highly specific query about the clarinets. However niche you reckon his job must be, it’s nicher.

Why, then, would I recommend “Tár” to friends who couldn’t give a damn about Mahler’s marriage, or Glenn Gould ’s posture at the piano—wonderfully mimicked by Blanchett—or Wilhelm Furtwängler’s relationship with the Nazis, or any of the other arcana that crop up? Because, strange to say, this film is not really about music. It’s about power. (Likewise, if you stayed away from “ Ford v Ferrari ,” in 2019, because it was targeted at car geeks, you missed an absorbing dramatization of rivalry and grit.) What matters, in the case of Sebastian, is not the fact that Lydia disagrees about the clarinets but, rather, the merciless manner in which she later fires him—or, in her phrase, “rotates” him—and throws in a character assassination as a cadenza. Conversely, check out the gleam in her gaze at the sight and the sound of Olga, who is not only hired by the Berlin Philharmonic but also, thanks to Lydia’s fine-fingered machinations, swiftly granted the solo part in Elgar’s Cello Concerto. The expression on the face of the resident first cellist, who had every right to expect the gig, is a study in decorous disappointment. Power leaves hope in its wake.

This is not the first movie about a classical conductor to be written, directed, and produced by an American filmmaker. Preston Sturges’s “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948) also fits the bill. Its baton-wielding hero, played with gusto by Rex Harrison, sported a vocational glee that would be anathema to Lydia. (“All I do is wave a little wand a little and out comes the music.”) Yet the tale was Sturges’s most wicked offering, its farcical theme adorned with grace notes of murderous intent, and a strain of that menace finds an echo in “Tár.” It’s only Field’s third feature, after “In the Bedroom” (2001) and “Little Children” (2006), and anyone struck by the sombreness of those films—by characters driven along paths darker than they foresaw—will be ready for the shadows in which Lydia, especially in her apartment, often dwells. Berlin may look enticingly civilized, with its unhurried café life and the embracing glow of its concert hall, but follow Lydia to a scuzzier district and down into a basement, in pursuit of Olga, and you enter a dripping underworld, where Lydia whacks her head against stone steps. Throughout the story, as you’d expect, she has been hyper-attentive to noise. Now, in dread, she listens to the pattering paws of an unseen dog.

Hounding marks the final movement of the film. (It’s the one section that feels rushed. Mind you, Lydia mocks the urge to stretch out the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth to inordinate length, telling her players to “forget Visconti,” so maybe a touch of haste is no bad thing.) To what extent she is a proven predator; how much she deserves to be preyed upon, in turn, by the gluttons of public indignation; and why, despite everything, she should enjoy our lingering sympathy in a way that a middle-aged man in her position would not: such issues will, no doubt, be aired and contested in due course. Field is wise enough to reserve judgment. It would be dead wrong, though, to consider “Tár” as a kind of op-ed made flesh. Treat it, instead, as a symphonic portrait, richly suffused with unhappiness; none of the people onscreen, aside from the headlong Olga, seem content with their lot, unless and until they are actually making music—without which, as Nietzsche said, life would be a mistake.

In the hands of a different actress, the portrait might well have fallen apart. “Tár” sans Blanchett is no more conceivable than “Born Yesterday” (1950) without Judy Holliday or “Erin Brockovich” (2000) without Julia Roberts . Nobody else would fit the frame. We have seen Blanchett, in previous roles, being flaky, noble, or mean, but the profusion of moods and motivations that is demanded of her here is something else. The part of Lydia is scored for hero, villain, mother, dictator, and fuckup, and Blanchett responds with perfect pitch. Her eyes are like spies, missing nothing, and her smile is a charmer’s knife. As the conductor is to the Berlin Philharmonic, so the actress is to the audience in the cinema; neither makes the grave mistake of wishing merely to be liked. If there is one gesture of hers, in “Tár,” that I didn’t entirely buy, it’s the single act of violence—of sacrilege, one might say, for it occurs in the midst of a performance—with which Lydia puts herself beyond the pale. Not so much brutal as brusque, the deed is too melodramatic for the subtle inflections that Field applies elsewhere. If you’re bent upon maleficence, as Rex Harrison demonstrated, then do it in style.

I have a practical motion to propose, arising from Field’s film. An orchestra, as Lydia points out, is “not a democracy,” but, nonetheless, might it be helpful if classical musicians took the word “maestro” and slung it out of circulation? Does the aura that enfolds it not lie at the rotten root of the story of Lydia Tár? If you worship a maestro, after all, don’t be surprised if you wind up as a slave to the rhythm. ♦

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Imperious hauteur … Cate Blanchett in Tár.

Tár review – Cate Blanchett is perfect lead in delirious, sensual drama

As the maestro heading into crisis in Todd Field’s outrageous tale, Blanchett’s performance pierces like a conductor’s baton through the heart

A second viewing has swept away – with hurricane force – the obtuse worries I had at the Venice film festival about Todd Field’s entirely outrageous, delirious and sensual psychodrama starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, the orchestra conductor starting to unravel and unhinge. I had misgivings then about the climactic element of melodrama – which I now see as a deliberate and brilliant stab of dissonance, brilliantly cueing up the film’s deeply mysterious and surreal final section.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt. Her performance will pierce you like a conductor’s baton through the heart – although the real-life conductor Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has complained about the apparent parallels between her own life and Tár’s, and there has never been any suggestion of wrongdoing in Alsop’s own career.

Tár is imagined to be principal conductor of a major German orchestra, addressed by colleagues as “maestro”. She is passionate, demanding, autocratic, with a rockstar prestige and an international touring lifestyle approaching that of the super-rich, and is married to her first violinist, played by Nina Hoss, with whom she has a child. But there are problems in Tár’s life. She runs a mentoring scholarship programme for women, administered by a tiresome, oleaginous would-be conductor, played by Mark Strong, and there are rumours that this is a source of young women with whom Tár has affairs. Her assistant, played by Noémie Merlant (another would-be conductor) appears to be someone else she is keeping on an emotional string, and she is being stalked by another former mentee who has become obsessed with her; Tár has furthermore conceived a tendresse for a new cellist. Meanwhile, her guest masterclass at Juilliard goes sour when a young student, identifying as Bipoc pangender, presumes to dismiss Bach on ideological grounds.

But this movie is not about anything as banal as “cancellation”. Tár suspects that there is something wrong: she is twitchy, paranoid and insomniac. We know from the outset that she is effectively being spied on. There are strange sounds, intrusions and things out of place. And the music itself amplifies the violence just beneath the surface. It could be that Field has fallen under the spell of the maestro himself, Austrian director Michael Haneke, with the refrigerated sleekness of the film’s look and the ideas about revenge-surveillance, the return of the repressed and the tyranny and cruelty in the classical music tradition.

Tár has a job in which hubris pretty much comes with the territory. She has invented herself through conducting: no other profession and no other kind of musical career could have worked. My second viewing made me see that part of Tár’s loss of control is due to her intense reaction to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, which she wanted to perform with her protege: the extravagance and the derangement of the music. It resonates with her and with us.

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
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Cate Blanchett
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‘tár’ review: cate blanchett astounds in todd field’s blistering character study.

The two-time Oscar winner plays a composer-conductor whose reputation is suddenly shattered by revelations of her personal life in this caustic dissection of power dynamics playing in Venice competition.

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TÁR review: Cate Blanchett is her own symphony in a sublime, unsettling drama

Todd Field's stunning portrait of a composer in crisis transcends its #MeToo outlines.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

Are all great artists necessarily great monsters, or is that just a story we've told ourselves for too long? The vectors of ego, talent, and personal liability collide in Todd Field's TÁR , a towering monolith of a movie rooted in an extraordinary, shattering performance by Cate Blanchett . She is Lydia Tár, whose success has earned her a rare kind of cultural cachet for a classical-music conductor: People pay just to watch her speak about her EGOT or her thoughts on Mahler, and moguls and doe-eyed groupies alike compete for the pleasure of her company. Her world is Gulfstreams and hushed hotel suites and a kind of severe, understated luxury (The devil wears Margiela , probably). There is always another prestige booking to jet off to or a class to teach at Juilliard, and a faithful assistant, Francesca ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire 's Noémie Merlant), to smooth out the details and keep the riffraff away.

Lydia also has a partner, Sharon (the great German actress Nina Hoss), and a young daughter in Berlin, where she leads the city's world-class orchestra. Their domestic life, cosseted as it is in their plush townhome and the day-to-day of intra-office politics (Sharon is also her lead violinist), contains a certain wariness: The pills Lydia urgently swallows when no one is looking aren't hers, and her interest in a new cellist, a brash Russian girl named Olga (Sophie Kauer), seems less than strictly professional. In fact she has a history of shining her light on pretty young women in the industry, and of withdrawing those affections in ways that don't always end well.

Whatever damage she leaves behind, though, tends to sink or slip away in the white noise of her fame. And also through sheer force of will: Lydia, her dark-blond hair swept back like a lion's mane and her presence the gravitational center of every room she walks into, embodies the role of maestro so completely that it's hard to imagine her ever having been a baby or even a small child; she might have sprung fully formed instead from Leonard Bernstein's forehead (naturally she knew "Lenny," a mentor).

But when a former mentee of her own commits suicide, questions of culpability and undue intimacies begin to spill over in ways that Francesca and the press department at the orchestra can no longer contain. These are the bare outlines of TÁR , though what unfolds in the film's nearly two-hour-and-40-minute runtime defy almost any kind of easy summation. Most of the first 15 minutes are fixed in an on-stage interview between Lydia and the real-life New Yorker journalist Adam Gopnik that feels, in some ways, like a pressure test — whether it will even be tenable to spend the next several hours with this person who is so mannered, so arrogant, so thoroughly consumed by her own monologue. But Lydia Tár, like all public figures, is a construct, and the remainder of the film is a wild unraveling, if not a full annihilation, of that elaborately built edifice.

Field — whose two previous films, 2001's In the Bedroom and 2006's Little Children , earned eight Academy Award nominations between them — took 16 years to make TÁR , and it feels very much like a magnum opus. His script is so masterfully formed and Lydia's world so wholly, viscerally realized that the movie becomes a sort of profound immersive experience; whatever the opposite of sensory deprivation tank is, this is it. Even the supporting parts are stupendously acted: Mark Strong as a fellow conductor who yearns to take Lydia's genius and cover himself in it like a balm; Merlant's Francesca, whose devotion and deference to her boss has subsumed nearly all of her own dreams; Hoss, who does more with her eyes in one devastating scene than most actors can do with the whole toolbox.

But the movie belongs to Blanchett, in a turn so exacting and enormous that it feels less like a performance than a full-body possession. That she slips often into fluent German and plays professional-grade piano in the film, among other things, is exceedingly impressive (watching her conduct, it feels like lightning might actually shoot out of her fingertips). But Lydia isn't a series of tricks and tics; she's a superstar and a virtuoso who has forgotten, perhaps, that she is also human, and that news comes for us all. Grade: A

‘TÁR’ review: Cate Blanchett enthralls in this remarkable character study

Movie review.

In the first moments of Todd Field’s mesmerizing character study “TÁR,” we see conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) waiting backstage to be introduced for an onstage conversation. She girds herself for the interrogation; taking a few deep breaths — decisive, metallic — and buttoning her jacket as if it might shield her from danger. Watching, you realize that Blanchett already has you hooked; she’s an actor able to find nuance and character in the simple act of breathing. From this scene flows a remarkable two and a half hours, in which we come to know if not necessarily understand this woman as the gilded world around her begins to crumble. With Blanchett in nearly every frame, this long movie never feels slow.

Tár is, we quickly learn, both genius and monster; an American musician living abroad and acclaimed worldwide for her composing (she’s an EGOT) and her conducting of the world’s major orchestras. She lives in Berlin, where she conducts the city’s acclaimed orchestra and has a child in partnership with the orchestra’s concertmaster (Nina Hoss). She is charming, when she wants to be: That onstage conversation that opens the film has her beautifully explaining how a conductor leads an orchestra “on the most extraordinary tour of pleasures.” And she is a nightmare; a user of people, icily dismissive of those who can’t help her (such as the students she instructs in a tense master class), tossing aside those whose usefulness she has outgrown, indifferent to the power dynamics at play. In one scene, she threatens a young child, and the temperature around you suddenly seems to drop.

It’s been a long wait for a new Todd Field film, of which this is only his third. His previous two movies were literary adaptations — his 2001 debut “In the Bedroom,” a wrenching story of a family facing tragedy, was based on an Andre Dubus work, and his 2006 drama of suburban parenthood, “Little Children,” was written with novelist Tom Perrotta. In both, he demonstrated a fascination with actors (Field is an actor himself) and an uncanny patience, letting the camera find the emotion in silence, in the subtlety on an actor’s face, in a breath.

Here, with Blanchett (Field has said the film was written for her, and wouldn’t have been made if she’d said no), he returns with an enormous crescendo. “TÁR” is full of unusual artistic choices: sudden cuts to strange dream sequences or unexplained events, passages in German that aren’t subtitled (though Blanchett manages to convey the meaning regardless), a general darkness to Florian Hoffmeister’s elegant cinematography that matches the nighttime tones of Blanchett’s voice. But, in keeping with Field’s trademark, every performance feels detailed and real. Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) is particularly haunting as Tár’s young assistant, a fellow musician quietly waiting for recognition that never comes. And watch the faces of the symphony members, particularly a cellist whose seniority Tár casually disregards; each has their own story.

But this tale of ambition and its cost — and its collateral damage — is Blanchett’s movie, and she delivers a tour de force in every scene. In the conducting sequences, she seems to stroke the music into existence; it’s as if she’s breathing it. At the gym, she hits a punching bag with a precise rhythm; at home, she moves like a self-important guest, all too aware of her status. “They can’t all conduct, honey,” she imperiously tells her small daughter, who has arranged her stuffed animals in a semicircle and wants to give them each a pencil to hold. “It’s not a democracy.”

With Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Alan Corduner, Mark Strong. Written and directed by Todd Field. 157 minutes. Rated R for some language and brief nudity. Opens Oct. 21 at multiple theaters.

‘Tár’: A seductive deep dive into a woman’s unraveling psyche

Cate blanchett has created the most indelible movie character this year.

Behold Lydia Tár: lithe and silkily glamorous as a Saluki , an intricately coiled helix of genius, nervous tics, elegant taste and steely nerve. Watching Cate Blanchett inhabit the most indelible character to materialize on-screen this year is to witness a fascinating feat of artistic doubling, wherein Blanchett brings her angular physicality and a quick, slashing intelligence to bear on a woman who’s creating herself in real time. “Tár,” the film that wraps around its mesmerizing antiheroine like a fawn-colored cashmere wrap, is less a movie than a seductive deep dive into an unraveling psyche of a woman who’s simultaneously defined by and apart from the world she has so confidently by the tail.

That world, in Lydia’s case, is classical music, a rarefied universe of transcendence and transaction that comes to hushed, high-stakes life in the hands of writer-director Todd Field. We meet Lydia — a renowned composer-conductor who was the protegee of Leonard Bernstein, who bestrides the Berlin Philharmonic like a sleek colossus and who has just written her memoir “Tár on Tár” — while she’s being interviewed at the New Yorker festival by the magazine’s culture writer Adam Gopnik . In an almost surreally long, real-time sequence, Gopnik (playing himself) tosses out learned questions that Lydia parries with casual brilliance, dissecting art, time, gendered language and the correct interpretation of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with erudite, offhand brio. With that single scene, Field conveys volumes of information about his protagonist, but also his bona fides as a first-class world builder: This is an environment he understands down to the last meticulously placed name-drop of Marin Alsop or Nan Talese .

Q&Q with Cate Blanchett and Todd Field

It’s also an environment that, for its outward veneer of cosmopolitan civility, roils with political scheming, sexual power plays and brazen ambition. As Lydia goes about her days — meeting with a dilettante-ish patron (Mark Strong), being interviewed by a star-struck journalist, leading a master class at Juilliard — her facade never cracks. She oversees the tailoring of her suits — copied from those worn by her male heroes — with the same ferocious perfectionism and withering contempt for complacency that she brings to the vinyl pressings she’s making for Deutsche Grammophon .

Lydia is so impressively competent, the social space she moves in so stylish and discrete, that it has no option but to come crashing down. “Tár” is an anatomy of that inevitable descent, prompted by an email to Lydia’s assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) from a former student that metastasizes into a personal and professional crisis of operatic proportions. Whether she’s mentoring younger musicians, “reading the tea leaves” or a composer’s emotional intent, or visiting eastern Peru to make field recordings, it turns out that Lydia’s business is essentially extractive.

Appropriately enough, Field’s script possesses its own musicality: He creates rapturous curlicues of heady dialogue that on its surface explores the nuances of post-#MeToo standards of workplace behavior and what has come to be known as cancel culture. Those thematic elements give “Tár” its frissons of resonance and ambiguity, with Lydia making a persuasive case for separating art from the artist. At Juilliard, she admits that as a “ U-Haul lesbian ,” she has little use for “ol’ Ludwig.” (The fundamental question, she insists, is, “Can music by old white men exalt us?”) When she’s finally confronted with her own infractions, what were abstract arguments become increasingly germane, and it becomes clear that what we think we’re watching — an illustrious career brought low by bad behavior, the twist being that the malefactor is a woman — is something else entirely.

That something is more interior, more chaotic and in many ways more disturbing, and it’s exquisitely limned by Field, who doles out information with tensely judicious restraint. No sooner are we ensconced in the soothing world that Lydia edgily inhabits than we discover that all those nervous twitches and superstitions aren’t the mannerisms of an egocentric artist. They’re talismans, deployed to fend off disorder and a creeping dread that, when it arrives, overmatches even Lydia’s lacerating ego and icy self-control.

This makes “Tár” sound grim, which it isn’t. Field has made a film about exploitation and self-loathing and compulsion, but with an extravagant eye for beauty and surface polish that makes it deeply pleasurable to watch. It would be enjoyable enough simply to behold Blanchett have her way with a role that she slips on with the grace and familiarity of one of Lydia’s bespoke suits. But Field has surrounded her with supporting performances that are just as alert, especially Nina Hoss’s turn as Sharon, Lydia’s patient but reflexively wary partner. Together with cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, Field films “Tár” in reassuring neutrals, his palette favoring soft grays and understated beiges. Much of the film plays out in silence — the musical score is composed by Hildur Gudnadóttir , who’s also name-checked by Lydia — a choice that emphasizes Lydia’s own hypersensitivity to the ambient sounds that constantly threaten to engulf her.

Then there’s the humor, which is so sly that it seems to operate on a frequency all its own. That Nan Talese line, for example, is both tonally perfect and hilarious, as are tossed-off asides about Clara Zetkin , NPR and the fact that Lydia’s dazzled young interviewer went to Smith. Late in the film, when a neighbor stops by Lydia’s studio to complain about the noise she’s making, she initially misunderstands, flashing a camera-ready smile and enthusing with fake modesty, “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

By far “Tár’s” best joke is saved for last, when Field speeds up the metronome and sends Lydia on a dizzying spiral that takes her far from Berlin, in a place where personal, professional and aesthetic reckoning land like a dissonant chord. The moral of the story seems simple enough: Keep it in your pants, boys and girls, lest you wind up in what could easily pass for sheer hell.

R. At area theaters. Contains some strong language and brief nudity. 153 minutes.

‘TAR’ Review: Cate Blanchett Is at Her Peak in Razor-Sharp Character Study

Todd Field’s drama engages playfully and provocatively with hot-button topics as Blanchett delivers yet another fiery performance

This review originally ran Sept. 1, 2022, for the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere.

If for nothing else, Todd Field’s “Tár” – a razor-sharp, post- post-MeToo character study that premiered on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival – should be heralded for offering a neat corollary to Chekhov’s Gun, a theatrical theory that states that if you introduce a gun in Act 1, you’d better fire it by Act 3.

Call this version Gopnik’s Speech. Because no film could open, as “Tár” does, with such a long and portentous introduction to the main character (She’s at the top of her game! She’s on a nickname basis with Leonard Bernstein! She’s a bloody EGOT!), delivered by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik playing himself, without clearly signaling its intent: for the two-and-a-half hours that follow, our poor protagonist will have nowhere to go but down.

And down she will go, falling from grace, and from the highest perch of the highbrow scene (see that fawning introduction) over the course of a tightly wound and impeccably crafted showcase for Cate Blanchett at her peak. Only as it careens towards an inevitable destination, “Tár” works more as psychological portrait than narrative freighter, putting you in the room with (and in the head of) a professional control freak as her life spirals out of control, all while observing the fallout with eerie calm. Tempests are always calmest from the eye of the storm.

Lydia Tár, as we quickly learn, is a conductor, perhaps the most acclaimed one alive, and that makes her a despot. But then, how else can she be? What is a conductor if not a manipulator, an absolute authority playing the musicians who in turn play their instruments, all to service the sublime?

For this capo di tutti capi , there is no offstage: Her life is her work, her work is her life, her wife is her co-worker and those co-workers answer to Lydia. That wife would be Sharon (Nina Hoss), a member of Lydia’s philharmonic with whom she shares an austere Berlin flat and a precocious young daughter. Although the word share might be doing some heavy lifting there, as Lydia also keeps a side-place all for herself and a number of side-flings. As Lydia says in a casually self-revealing line, a musician’s “only home is the podium.”

Mind you, our Tár oh so rarely bares her soul. She is the predator, not the prey, a shark with a pantsuit and a power walk cutting her way through each and every room. As a filmmaker, Field plays the long game, staging the film’s first act as a series of interactions, all shot in unflashy but still noticeable unbroken takes, that find the alpha dog using her every wile – be it tenderness or eloquence or wit –to dominate her every foil.

In the moment, the technique offers the theatrically trained Blanchett a stage on which to shine, lending the actor a certain tool more common to theater than film: the sense of unbroken time that jolts the viewer into the present tense. Only those set-ups pay off in richly cinematic ways later on, especially once that always-immediate-but-never-embodied beast of social media rears its ugly head.

So is this thin narrative, which follows the conductor’s fall from grace when news of past misconduct comes to light, really about Cancel Culture? Well, not quite. But through references to the pandemic, allusions to contemporary politics and culture and meta-winks (at one point, Lydia praises the music of Hildur Guðnadóttir – the film’s very composer), “Tár” is very much anchored to the here and now. As such, it engages both playfully and provocatively with the topics that animate social media. Topics like race, topics like gender, topics like – well, just log on to Twitter and find out. Just as Lydia goes viral, so too will “Tár” – it’s designed to.

Which is to say, it’s designed to challenge using the lingua franca of the day. Less reactionary than reactive, “Tár” owes yet another debt to the stage in the way it wrangles this or that topic inflaming the current debate and funnels them all into a contained narrative driven almost entirely by interpersonal power exchanges. In the abstract, it has the form of a modern drama, and feels like the play David Mamet has been trying to write for the past 15 years.

Still, for all this talk of theater, the film is rich with cinematic texture, from Florian Hoffmeister’s chilly widescreen cinematography, which lights otherwise unremarkable interior as if each was a haunted house, to the elaborate audio design, symphonic all on its own, doing as much justice to door creaks and to ambient noise as to Mahler’s 5 th .

As Lydia’s wife and as her assistant Francesca, actors Hoss and Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) do fine supporting work, but both are only singing backup to the lead out in the spotlight. In function and in form, they hover in Lydia’s orbit.

And what of Lydia then? Well, it sounds a bit obvious to praise another Cate Blanchett performance – when is she not on fire? – but in this case circumstances force our hand. More otherworldly than Galadriel, more regal than Elizabeth, and more devilishly unrepressed than Carol Aird, “Tár” might just be the actor’s signature role.

“TÁR” opens in select US theaters Oct. 7 and nationwide Oct. 28 via Focus Features.

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‘Wicked Little Letters’ Review: Prim, Proper and Profane

Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley elevate a comedy about a weird true tale of defamation and dirty words.

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Two women stand separately at adjacent open doors, looking and smiling at each other.

By Alissa Wilkinson

“This is more true than you’d think,” handwritten text informs us at the start of “Wicked Little Letters.” I looked it up , and they weren’t kidding. The movie involves tweaks and elisions to history, of course. But at least in its major outlines, the true story matches the film, in which a dour spinster named Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and her raucous next-door neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) tangle over a series of mysteriously obscene letters that started arriving at the homes of people in the English coast village of Littlehampton in 1920. As you may intuit, this movie belongs to a very particular subgenre summed up in one declaration: boy, small English towns are full of weirdos.

Directed by Thea Sharrock (who has an impressive two movies out this week — the other is “The Beautiful Game”) from a screenplay by the comedy writer Jonny Sweet, “Wicked Little Letters” is a darkly funny take on the tale, leaning a lot more toward the farce than the darkness. Edith, the oldest daughter in a large and very pious family, still lives with her parents (Timothy Spall and Gemma Jones). They sleep in three twin beds in the same room. They rarely go anywhere and are constantly scandalized.

Edith has been under her father’s thumb so long that any will she possessed has been wholly squashed out, which makes her exactly the ideal of feminine virtue for 1920s England. The men have returned from war — those who survived, anyhow — and retaken the jobs and roles women filled, relegating them back to the kitchen and domestic life. Edith, homely but docile, is everything a good Christian Englishwoman should be.

And of course, anyone who deviates from Edith’s type is suspicious. Rose, for instance, has committed a quadruple feat of sin: living with her Black boyfriend (Malachi Kirby), having a daughter (Alisha Weir) who dares the unladylike act of picking up a guitar, enjoying a night at the pub and, most of all, being Irish.

When she arrived in Littlehampton, she was a figure of affable curiosity to her neighbors, especially Edith. But by the time we meet them, Edith has accused Rose of sending elegantly written obscene letters to her and to the neighbors — letters containing marvelously inventive strings of epithets so vile that I cannot reproduce them in this newspaper. Edith endures the letters with a visage so saintly that you can practically see her halo: “We worship a Messiah who suffered, so by my suffering, do I not move closer to heaven?” she intones to her parents, eyes modestly cast down.

We soon learn why Edith says Rose is motivated to write the letters. This is where the movie loses some steam, because early on, it’s obvious that all is not as it seems, something the put-upon local cop Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) is sure of from the jump. Gladys’s father was a police officer, which is why she became one, though the men she works with lord their maleness over her, putting her down at every opportunity. (She introduces herself to everyone as “Woman Police Officer Moss,” because they’re going to comment on it, anyhow.) Gladys is determined to hunt down the facts, with the help of a few local women who’ve managed to maintain minds of their own.

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“Wicked Little Letters” plays like a caper, its mystery worn lightly in what is less of a mystery and more of a lavish consideration of how annoying and stupid the men of Littlehampton (and perhaps, by extension, men in general) were around 1920. Each one is an idiot (save for Rose’s partner, who has dealt with plenty of slights of his own), made foolish and useless by the kind of misogyny that insists they must be better than women because, well, I mean, women , you know.

The magistrates and clergy and officers of the law all refuse to see what’s right in front of them precisely because they’re blinded by prejudice. They are boorish and boring and bad, and the more weak minded or browbeaten of the women follow right along.

This makes for gently witty comedy, everyone falling into their types easily and pleasantly. (At one point, “DIE SLUT” is splashed in paint across Rose’s door. “It’s German,” she remarks to her daughter, pulling her inside.) The movie is full of goofy side characters and one-liners, yet elevated occasionally to genuine complexity by Colman and Buckley, who are consistently the best thing about any movie they’re in. And, it’s fun to see them together, given Buckley recently played a younger version of Colman in “The Lost Daughter.”

“Wicked Little Letters” would almost be a pretty family-friendly comedy (or at least well suited for more delicate palates) save for one thing: A great deal of its humor comes from the spectacle of watching various upright, uptight, prudish figures spew uninterrupted streams of profanity in inappropriate places: courtrooms, living rooms, the middle of the street. It is pretty funny the first and second and third time. It starts to feel like a crutch after a while.

If that doesn’t bug you, then “Wicked Little Letters” is enjoyable enough, buoyed by its cast, the kind of movie that provokes a few chuckles but won’t stick to your ribs. But I was left pondering a particular characteristic of this kind of period movie. It has a point to make about the plight of women in a patriarchal world, whether they’re seen as angels or trollops; that’s not merely set dressing for the movie, but the text itself. Yet I can’t escape the feeling that we’re meant to laugh at the dull-witted prejudiced people of a hundred years ago, the way they suppress themselves and oppress one another. Aren’t we lucky we’re not like them anymore?

That’s one way to look at it. The truth is more complicated. But perhaps the movie knows it: This is , as we were warned, more true than you’d think.

Wicked Little Letters Rated R for many, many, many naughty words and one brief bare bum. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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Someone Like You

Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young archit... Read all Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young architect launches a search for her secret twin sister. Based on the novel by #1 NYTimes bestselling author Karen Kingsbury, "Someone Like You" is an achingly beautiful love story. After the tragic loss of his best friend, a grieving young architect launches a search for her secret twin sister.

Tyler Russell
Karen Kingsbury
Sarah Fisher
Lynn Collins
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London Quinn …

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April 2, 2024 (United States)
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