tar movie review 2022

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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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Film credits.

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

Sylvia Flote as Krista Taylor

Vincent Riotta as Cory Berg

Cinematographer

• Florian Hoffmeister
• Monika Willi
• Hildur Guðnadóttir

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‘Tár’ Review: A Maestro Faces the Music

Cate Blanchett stars as a world-famous conductor heading for a fall in Todd Field’s chilly, timely backstage drama.

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By A.O. Scott

Early in “Tár” there is a shot of a Wikipedia entry being edited by unseen hands. Whose hands? That question will turn out to be relevant to the plot, but for the moment it is overwhelmed by the mystique of the page’s subject, who is also the protagonist of Todd Field’s cruelly elegant, elegantly cruel new film.

Her name is Lydia Tár, and in the world Field has imagined — one that exists at an oblique angle to our own — it’s a household name. She is introduced to us by the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik , humbly playing himself as he interviews Lydia, regally played by Cate Blanchett, on a Manhattan stage. Gopnik’s introductory remarks provide a Wikipedia-style summary with a bit of Talk of the Town filigree, establishing that this is a person who surely needs no introduction.

Lydia’s résumé is a litany of meritocratic glory and upper-middlebrow glitter so lustrous as to verge on satire. She’s a conductor and composer — a maestro — who claims Leonard Bernstein as her mentor and whose career has been a steady ascent through the great orchestras of Cleveland, Boston and New York to her current perch at the Berlin Philharmonic. She has a Harvard Ph.D. and belongs to the highly exclusive EGOT club, having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. She has recorded all of Mahler’s symphonies but one, which is coming soon, as is a book, “Tár on Tár,” that will surely be a best seller.

How did she do it? If Lydia Tár were a real person, “Tár” might take the conventional musical biopic route, tracing a path from modest beginnings through hard work and lucky breaks, adversity and triumph. That would be a remarkable story, given that in the real world vanishingly few major orchestras have been led by women. (Nathalie Stutzmann, recently installed as musical director of the Atlanta Symphony , is currently the only one in America, as Marin Alsop was until she stepped down from the Baltimore Symphony last year.)

Like “Late Night,” the 2019 movie which cast Emma Thompson as a powerful network television talk-show host, “Tár” doesn’t so much smash a glass ceiling as dissolve it by creative fiat. Lydia’s rise is not what we are here to see. She has been installed at the pinnacle of her profession so that we may witness her fall.

Following Lydia from New York back home to Berlin, Field strews omens and red herrings in her path, slowly and deliberately fostering a mood of dread and paranoia. She receives an anonymous gift — a signed early edition of Vita Sackville-West’s novel “Challenge” — that she destroys in an airplane lavatory. Strange noises at home disrupt her sleep and distract her from her work. A curious visual motif, a maze or mandala, turns up mysteriously in odd places.

Meanwhile, there are hints of domestic and professional trouble. Lydia lives with Sharon (Nina Hoss), the Philharmonic’s first violinist, and their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). The couple’s intimacy is edged with wariness and unspoken resentment. Sharon looks perpetually tired. Their child is being bullied in school. The orchestra’s long-serving second conductor (Allan Corduner) has outstayed his welcome. Lydia’s assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who has musical ambitions of her own, gazes at her boss with adoration, terror and simmering rage. A young Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer), auditions for a place in the string section, catching Lydia’s attention with her expressive bowing technique and her blue suede boots. (Kauer, a professional cellist as well as an actor, does her own playing in the film.)

Field, whose chilly, psychologically charged style evokes Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick — he had a small, memorable role in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” — records it all with ruthless detachment and fanatical control. He moves smoothly from dry backstage comedy to something like gothic horror. We can’t be sure if Lydia is the monster, the victim, or both.

Does the suspense that builds through the film’s long, faultlessly executed middle section arise from the dread that something terrible will happen to her, or the premonition that she will do something horrible? Both outcomes are plausible. Early on, we witness her discreet betrayal and casual gaslighting of Sharon, her quiet humiliation of a benefactor and rival conductor (Mark Strong) and her chilling confrontation with Petra’s bully. That scene, in which Lydia introduces herself as “Petra’s father” and threatens a small child in perfect German, is both thrilling and terrifying. Her charisma is overpowering, her power unchecked and her confidence absolute.

That will all change, a process Field observes with almost unbearable objectivity. If he refrains from schadenfreude, he also withholds compassion. While “Tár” unfolds in a rarefied cultural space, where aesthetic perfection seems less an ideal than a daily expectation, it also plants itself in a tawdry and contentious zone of contemporary discourse. Field leaves no doubt that Lydia is a tremendous musician, capable of matching Mahler’s genius with her own, and inspiring others to scale the peaks of greatness in her company. Blanchett is completely convincing in this regard — and also in showing Lydia’s imperiousness, her sadism and her predatory manipulation of younger women like Francesca and Olga.

At one point, Sharon describes all of Lydia’s relationships — except with their daughter — as “transactional.” This is a precise, if somewhat abstract, word for a chaotic, destructive pattern of behavior that Lydia’s position has allowed her to get away with. Her comeuppance is equally chaotic, as “Tár” refuses to resolve itself either into a parable of #MeToo justice or a rant about the excesses of cancel culture. (It’s so committed to its noncommittal stance that it sacrifices a dramatic ending for a ragged, wandering, superfluous denouement.)

Toward the end, Leonard Bernstein shows up, in a wobbly black-and-white video recording of one of his Young People’s Concerts, to explain that the meaning of music lies in “how it makes you feel.” A piece of music, he says, carries you through time on an emotional journey that defies easy summary. Sometimes, the feelings are so complicated and particular that they don’t have names, and “Tár,” whose smooth visual surface is roiled by the passions of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony , Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor and Hildur Gudnadottir’s original score, approaches that condition.

It invites you to think hard about Lydia, about the meaning of her work and the consequences of her actions, about whether she is someone you should admire or revile, about whether artists should be judged by their work or by how they live their lives. In different contexts, Lydia herself argues both sides of that question, as many of us do, and to search the movie for a consistent argument is to miss the point and fall into a category error, misconstruing the extraordinary coup that Field and Blanchett have pulled off. We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art.

Tár Rated R. Violent dissonance. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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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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‘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.

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

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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.

“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.

Watch L.A. Times Today at 7 p.m. on Spectrum News 1 on Channel 1 or live stream on the Spectrum News App. Palos Verdes Peninsula and Orange County viewers can watch on Cox Systems on channel 99.

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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Set in the international world of Western classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and the very first female director ... Read all Set in the international world of Western classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and the very first female director of a major German orchestra. Set in the international world of Western classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and the very first female director of a major German orchestra.

• Cate Blanchett
• Noémie Merlant
• 522 User reviews
• 299 Critic reviews
• 93 Metascore
• 74 wins & 270 nominations total

• Francesca Lentini

• Sharon Goodnow

• Olga Metkina
• Adam Gopnik
• Tailor's Assistant #1
• Tailor's Assistant #2

• Krista Taylor

• Whitney Reese

• Eliot Kaplan

• (as Zethphan Smith-Gneist)

• Alec Baldwin

• Jessica Hansen
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Professional cellist Sophie Kauer had no prior acting experience and auditioned at the encouragement of a friend. She learned to act by watching YouTube tutorials hosted by Michael Caine .
• Goofs When Lydia is talking to the two technicians after a rehearsal in Berlin, she requests they send her audio and video recordings, but the console in front of them in the booth is actually for controlling lights, not audio/video.

Lydia Tár : Don't be so eager to be offended. The narcissism of small differences leads to *the* most boring conformity.

• Crazy credits The opening credits presents the film crew and acknowledgments (usually shown at the end titles) without presenting the actors. The actors and soundtrack are shown at the ending without the crew.
• Connections Edited from The Blair Witch Project (1999)
• Soundtracks Das Wohltemperierte Klavier: Präludium and Fuge C-Dur, BWV 846 Written by Johann Sebastian Bach Piano, Cate Blanchett

User reviews 522

• ryanpersaud-59415
• Nov 6, 2023

Movies & Series About Musicians

• How long is Tár? Powered by Alexa
• October 28, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
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• Dresden, Saxony, Germany (Kulturpalast & Großen Garten Platz)
• Focus Features
• Standard Film Company
• EMJAG Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $25,000,000 (estimated)
• Oct 9, 2022
• $29,048,571

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 38 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital

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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

Chief Film Critic

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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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Tár Reviews

Cate Blanchett is obviously one of the greatest actors of her generation. But this. This is new. I know the weight it carries when I say this, but this is her greatest achievement as an actor. Tár should make you uncomfortable, and boy does it.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2024

A journey that leads Lydia to a descent into the abyss of his mistakes, guilt, fear and a poetic revenge that comes against her for the wrong, but not undeserving reasons.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2023

With ‘Tár,’ director Todd Field takes an unflinching look at the absolute corruption of absolute power as well as the healing might of music

Full Review | Aug 27, 2023

A masterfully composed portrait of a complicated woman and her relationships — with her family, with her industry, with time — Tár is a nuanced piece that naturally raises difficult, uncomfortable dialogue.

Full Review | Aug 10, 2023

This Oscar-worthy performance by Blanchett gets its power from her complete embrace of the character. She goes so deep into the character, the film begins to feel more like fact than fiction.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Aug 9, 2023

Todd Field uses smart scriptwriting and the extraordinary acting skills of Cate Blanchett to conduct a virtual symphony of cinema that resonates long after the closing credits.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

"Tár" is a commentary on cancel culture and the new world older professionals find themselves in, especially those in leadership positions who don't seem to understand that everything said or done will find its way on video.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Cate Blanchett that engrossed the audience within every captivating monologue & sequence throughout. Todd Field focuses on EGO, POWER, & MIND that one person has & their fall from grace

TÁR is an intoxicating portrait of how a female conductor not only shapes and manipulates music, but also the world she operates in which ultimately leads to her own self-destruction.

TAR is an actor's movie that should be celebrated. It is beautifully put together and performed and, despite its length, is wholly worth a watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 25, 2023

the character study of a brilliant, pretentious, cruel genius who gets no redemption by the time the credits roll.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Tár does not make heavy-handed accusations about the state of our society and people in power. Instead, it asks the audience to look at Lydia, to see her as the totality of who she is.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Tár is a fantastic directorial return for Todd Field, well worth the wait and one of the strongest films on the Awards circuit. Blanchett has rightly earned rave reviews for her turn as the complicated titular character

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 19, 2023

Tár is not only an extremely sharp character study but a masterpiece. It is a work of great talents and heights that enrapture the viewer in a maelstrom of cinematic catharsis.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 19, 2023

Simply put, "TÁR" is magnificent, as all Field's films have been.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 16, 2023

Field doesn’t indulge the type of Possessed Artist sequences we might expect from a prestige actor’s showcase like this but Blanchett foments a volatile sociopathy within the character, illustrating the precariousness of her top-of-the-world perch.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2023

With [Cate] Blanchett, you can tune most of the naff pretension that sometimes sneaks through in Tár’s musings, but coming out of the lips of anyone less assured and it would fall painfully flat.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 9, 2023

Director-writer Todd Field paints a grim character study of a driven woman whose aspirations are multi-tasked.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Apr 14, 2023

Examines the corrosive power dynamic underlying the exchange of one's identity for mass attention [...] oblique, and complex, all the subliminal moments cleverly inserted into the texture of the narrative to keep the mythic time ticking, like a metronome.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 9, 2023

It wasn't a lack of performance but I struggled with it up until the end.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 4, 2023

Screen Rant

Tar review: blanchett is phenomenal in todd field's riveting, powerful drama.

While the film isn’t preachy, Tár is all the more riveting because it is so focused on telling a layered, nuanced, and powerful story.

Tár may just be one of the best films of the year. Written and directed by Todd Field, the film — a drama about the downfall of a world-renowned classical music composer/conductor — boasts a masterful performance from Cate Blanchett . Tár ponders whether the art can be separated from the artist, a question that has long plagued the minds of anyone who has ever consumed entertainment made by someone who has committed certain, sometimes unforgivable, acts. While the film isn’t preachy, nor is Field consumed with laying down a moral gavel, Tár is all the more riveting because it is so focused on telling a layered, nuanced, and powerful story.

Lydia Tár (Blanchett) is a conductor and classical music composer who has everything going for her. Lydia is at the height of her career — a glowing New Yorker article has been published about her importance, she is a guest lecturer at Juilliard, she’s in the midst of promoting her new memoir, and has composed new music to be performed at the Berlin Philharmonic where she is a conductor, the first woman to achieve such a renowned and highly coveted position. However, when Lydia’s assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) reveals that Krista, a young woman from both of their pasts, has been emailing Lydia in the hopes for a response, Lydia’s prestigious and well-managed life begins to unravel as new information comes to light and threatens to upend her entire career.

Related: Nina Hoss & Sophie Kauer Discuss The Beauty Of Tár's Music

Tár , much like its lead character, is tightly controlled. It's a masterclass in storytelling, one that aims to explore an egotistical figure at the crossroads of power, gender, and influence in the music industry. The choice to focus on a woman in such a position to abuse her power is an interesting one considering how much more likely it is for a man to do so given they are more often the ones in Lydia’s place. However, Field’s decision allows the story to explore Lydia’s class anxiety and white feminism — the conductor comes from a working class family, and she sets up several programs to encourage young women studying classical music, but it’s all for show and to ensure Lydia is named the first woman to do such a thing. There’s also scene early on in the film where Lydia suggests she didn’t face any challenges as a woman in the industry and then suggests to one of her investors that the programs for women should be removed because it’s been long enough. Most of what Lydia does is to remain in power, or as close to it as possible no matter what.

As the film goes on and viewers witness her relationships with the young women under her tutelage, audiences get a sense of exactly the kind of person Lydia is , and the ways in which she uses her power to manipulate people and situations. Tár does not purport to be an ethical guide, nor does it really sympathize with Lydia. Rather, the film is more a look at how someone in her position might meet their reputable doom, as well as an exploration of someone who is high on their own power and sense of importance. It's a bold and intriguing character study that doesn't hold back on its subject matter, building towards a crescendo that will leave audiences in awe of what they have just witnessed. The film allows viewers to ponder those in power and how their art is viewed when contemplating the artists and their complicated history — be it wholly indecent or otherwise.

Cate Blanchett’s powerhouse performance elevates the film from excellent to must-see. Blanchett has always been a strong actress, but she brings her A-game to Tár . She showcases the grip Lydia has on her life, the ways in which she keeps people at arm’s length, and the controlled sense of domination she exudes. Even as Lydia’s hold over her career becomes tenuous, and she begins to lose control over her own narrative, Blanchett’s nuanced portrayal brilliantly captures her character’s cracking shell and the boiling temper and fear that sits beneath the surface. It’s safe to say that Tár is one of Blanchett’s most enthralling performances of her career.

At over two and a half hours long, Tár never feels long, and it's engrossing at every turn. Field's film is intoxicating in all the best ways, emotionally visceral and captivating. While Blanchett is the obvious standout, the supporting cast is wonderful, their performances complementing her calculated intensity in every scene. With Tár being so immersed in the world of classical music, it would be remiss to go without mentioning the spectacular score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, which is crucial to the film's execution. Watching Tár is akin to listening to a symphony orchestra — it's moving, passionate, and will leave one wanting more long after the lights come up.

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Tár released in limited theaters Friday, October 7 and will expand nationwide on October 28. The film is 158 minutes long and is rated R for some language and brief nudity.

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‘Tár’ Review: Cate Blanchett Orchestrates Her Own Destruction

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Focus Features releases the film in theaters on Friday, October 7.

“TÁR” is so much more than the Great American Movie about “cancel culture” — a phrase that it humiliates with every movement — but this dense and difficult portrait of a female conductor’s fall from grace also demands to be seen through that singular lens from its very first shot. Todd Field ’s thrilling, deceptively austere third film exalts in grabbing the electrified fence of digital-age discourse with both hands and daring us to hold onto it for 158 minutes in the hopes that we might ultimately start to feel like we’re shocking ourselves.

“TÁR” is a provocation full of slow-motion suckerpunches and the driest of laughs (even its accented title is a knowingly pretentious in-joke) and yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in patronizing them. That sounds like a tough needle to thread for a film so micro-targeted that it opens with a long, long scene of its subject onstage for an expository conversation with The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, who needs no introduction.

But the “Little Children” maestro’s first movie in 16 years — and the only original screenplay he’s ever directed — isn’t quite the ultra-mordant satire you might imagine if someone just told you where its final scene takes place. On the contrary, Field has come back to us with a savage yet acutely sincere character study that’s slathered in a million shades of gray. “TÁR” tells the story of a trailblazing woman whose aspiration to embody the grandeur of the past makes her vulnerable to the uniquely modern pitfalls of the present. The film is every bit as brilliant and implosive as she is.

“TÁR” boasts the sweep and frustrated gravitas of a project that Field has been working on since the day he stepped out of the spotlight more than a decade ago, and yet it tells a story that could only have taken shape during the last stretch of his absence. Fearless in a way that allows its heroine to seem blithely unaware as to what she’s supposed to be afraid of, this is the kind of film that could only be made by someone who’s been watching the world burn from the sidelines for so long — long enough that he doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t play with fire himself, and from a distance that allows him to keep his attention focused squarely on the nature of what’s fueling it.

“TÁR” will probably gross all of $57 at the box office (give or take), but everyone who buys a ticket will be inspired to destroy their own German orchestra from the inside out, or at least write a thinkpiece about why. Let’s not hold that against one of the boldest and most exciting new American movies I’ve seen in years.

Following in the massive footsteps of creative giants like Scott Rudin and Tracy Jordan, Lydia Tár is one of the only living people to have won an EGOT. Of course, whatever awards might crowd the mantel of the brutalist apartment that Lydia shares with her partner/concertmaster Sharon ( Nina Hoss ) and their adopted Syrian daughter in Berlin are merely progress markers on the New York-born conductor’s fated path towards the sort of immortality reserved for the legends of her field.

Legends such as Gustav Mahler, whose fifth symphony Lydia will soon record with the German orchestra she’s led for the last seven years, cementing her legacy as the greatest maestro of her time. Leonard Bernstein, who taught Lydia everything he knew about keeping time, and defying it. Johann Sebastian Bach, an über-demanding asshole whose music endures despite the fact that it’s become symbolic of the classical world’s exclusionary whiteness.

Lydia’s heroes, we note, are all men, whereas she is a self-described “U-Haul lesbian” who styles herself after Céline Sciamma (it would seem), eviscerates her enemies with a single flex of her razor-sharp cheekbones, and refuses to make a “gender spectacle” out of her well-earned success as the world’s first and only female conductor of a major orchestra. We can only imagine how brilliant a woman like Lydia had to be in order to fly so close to the heavens — or what she had to do in order to stay there for so long — but “TÁR” will depict in exacting detail what the world might look like to someone who can’t see beyond the sun in their eyes.

Blanchett makes for a magnificent 21st century Icarus. Expertly weaponizing her inimitable gravitas away from art and towards predatory self-preservation instead, the “Carol” star commands the movie’s lengthy and unbroken scenes as if she were conducting them herself; as Lydia gradually loses her ability to modulate the tempo of the world around her, “TÁR” finds a sickening pleasure in the dissonance between a spiraling character and an actor in perfect control of her instrument.

We’ve seen Blanchett play women on the verge of a nervous breakdown before, but she’s never obliterated herself on screen with such concussive force. The controlled demolition of a performance she delivers here provides a more nuanced (and cautiously sympathetic) interpretation of the social dynamics behind the #MeToo movement than any male actor or character might be able to offer. It’s because of Blanchett that “TÁR” is able to elevate the uselessly outmoded paradigm of separating the art from the artist into the visceral portrait of an artist separating from herself.

Lydia is a harsh and unsparing character whose flesh is probably closer to shark cartilage than skin, but the power of her genius has been corrupted by the genius of her power, and we can’t help but wince at how earnestly she believes that each of those things is required to complete the other — operating in sync like the hands of a clock, or those of a conductor with similar precision. Actually, identifying it as a conscious belief isn’t quite right; it would be more accurate to describe Lydia’s mindset as a side effect of the system that has consecrated her success. The system that enforces the same hierarchy Lydia’s fame would seem to disrupt, and the system that has convinced her that she can only affirm her status by abusing it at every opportunity.

Needless to say, that doesn’t bode very well for the fellowship that Lydia and investment banker/wannabe conductor Eliot Kaplan ( Mark Strong ) have created to support female musicians in the classical music community. One of those young musicians — a twentysomething violinist named Krista Taylor — seems to have had a particularly traumatic experience under Lydia’s intimate tutelage, and has been hounding the conductor with cryptic pleas for attention that Lydia doesn’t want to hear (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” breakout Noémie Merlant plays Lydia’s full-time assistant and part-time accomplice, feeding her boss little white pills and silencing her victims in exchange for the orchestra promotion she’s implicitly been promised).

Lydia protects herself with the aura of her own perfection, insisting that her pursuit of kavanah — a Hebrew word referring to the concentrated mental state required for ritualistic devotion — excuses any collateral damage that might befall the “robots” who get in her way. She is Moses standing on the mountaintop and bringing the word of God down to the masses, a gifted conduit for a message that has long been defined by its means of delivery.

It’s a role that Field illustrates across the span of the stunning early sequence shot in which Lydia humiliates a jittery BIPOC Juilliard student for his refusal to play the music of a racist dead white man like Bach. “Don’t be so eager to be offended,” Lydia jaws at him from her seat at the piano, “the narcissism of small differences leads to conformity.” As with many of this strict but unfussy film’s most breathless scenes, the tension doesn’t come from a tug-of-war between two competing perspectives, but rather from how they constrict together and choke each other to death.

On the one hand, Lydia argues that a single piece can be transformed by an infinite array of interpretations; she plays a simple melody in three widely different ways, providing one of the precious few moments in which anyone in this movie is actually seen creating music (Field usually cuts away with a fetishistic sense of deprivation, edging his audience toward the third act climax). On the other hand, she’s also reaffirming the age-old notion that art’s power is inextricable from the power that we assign it. That art can’t be preserved if we don’t allow it to ossify, and vice-versa. “They can’t all conduct, honey,” Lydia coos at her daughter much later in the story. “It’s not a democracy.”

In context, Lydia’s argument has its own suffocating merits, but Field shoots it in a single long-take so that he can chop it up on social media after Krista’s suicide ignites a viral firestorm over the conductor’s alleged misconduct. Lydia demands to know where Twitter was when Schopenhauer threw some random old woman down a flight of stairs, but power has always been a devil’s bargain, and everyone in “TÁR” is forced to keep their own receipts for the transactional relationships that hold our world together.

Where a lesser version of this story might have trended towards victim-blaming — or been so afraid to do so that it bent itself into frustratingly didactic shape — “TÁR” crescendos by further aligning itself with Lydia as it goes along. The film doesn’t take her side, per se, but rather embraces her subjectivity until even the most crucial story beats are played off-screen just because Lydia refuses to hear them.

That slow-motion unraveling is transposed against the conductor’s relationship with a rising young cellist in her orchestra (first-time British actor Sophie Kauer, instantly believable as the Russian Olga Metkina). The dynamic between them unfolds like a reprise of Lydia’s tryst with Krista, echoes of which only grow louder in Lydia’s ears over the course of a movie that splits the difference between the drab psychic pall of Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” and the unsmiling dreaminess of Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” — in which Field himself played jazz pianist Nick Nightingale. Nothing says “Time’s Up” quite like the ticking metronome that Lydia hears in the middle of the night.

The predatory intentionality of Lydia’s approach is undeniable, regardless of Olga’s reaction to it, but even more overt is how these women don’t have any other way to interact with each other. The institution that brings them together is so inflexibly hierarchical that every chair is assigned a specific importance based on its distance from the podium, and any hint of desire between the people who sit in them — personal or professional, appropriate or otherwise — is tainted by its proximity to power. To that point, “TÁR” is utterly convincing in how it depicts the gossip and politics behind an elite orchestra, with Hildur Guðnadóttir’s unobtrusive score helping to smooth over the seams even as Lydia comes apart on screen.

But it’s the undoing that makes “TÁR” such a tour de force, this long and patient movie growing less abstract and more unflinchingly personal as Lydia reaches the end of her rope. Oppressive sheets of gray sky and colorless slabs of concrete — only punctuated by text bubbles and errant glimpses of ripe fruit during the first two hours — eventually give way to the unexpected hum of hot neon lights. The last stages of this story (and its smirking humdinger of a final shot) are velveted by a soft glow that feels universes removed from the brutal rigidity of its build-up, and, with impressive boldness, they manage to rescue “TÁR” from the same cynicism that once seemed certain to smother it.

“TÁR” might be seen as a social lighting rod upon its initial release, if it’s seen at all. But it will endure because of the strange notes it strikes amid a world of white noise; because of how unflinchingly it watches Lydia “obliterate herself before the music,” and how convincingly it entertains the remote possibility that she might find a way to hear herself in it again.

“Tár” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival . Focus Features will release it in theaters on Friday, October 7.

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Tár Brilliantly Undoes an Ego Monster of an Artist

Tár is about someone who gets Me Too’d. Its central figure is a celebrity conductor whose career is reaching its apex when it collides with allegations of misconduct. The fact that she’s female would play, in the hands of a less interesting filmmaker, like a twist or some kind of thought experiment — What if a woman were the accused? What then ? But Tár was written and directed by Todd Field, who’s so interesting that, despite all the acclaim received by In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2006), he couldn’t get another project into production for 15 years, and it’s a lot more intrigued by the dynamics of ego and acclaim than it is with gender. Rather than fixate on the question of whether women can abuse power (the answer is obviously yes, though as with most things, we have historically been given less opportunity), Tár wraps itself up in the life of its imperious protagonist, dwelling on how accustomed she has become to being indulged, and how accustomed everyone around her has become to indulging her.

It’s a total knockout, both austere and dryly hilarious, and its quality is impossible to consider separately from its colossal lead performance. As Lydia Tár, Cate Blanchett makes herself intense, awful, awe-inspiring, and ridiculous — someone who may very well be great, but who’s also been pickled in her own praise. Lydia was born Linda, we learn in a passing exchange that speaks volumes. Tár is packed with details that reward close attention, not because it’s an especially plotty film, but because it keeps its gaze on its main character, mirroring her own self-consumed existence. Events that Lydia’s not paying direct attention to tend to slip by the corners of or off the screen entirely, at least until they become urgent enough that she can no longer ignore them. And the eyes of the world — at least, the elite world of classical music that Lydia inhabits — are usually on her, as emphasized by the subsequent acts of surveillance and performance with which the film begins.

In the opening scene, Lydia, asleep on a plane to New York, is unknowingly livestreamed on a phone belonging to one of the people in her orbit, though which one, and who this unseen figure is messaging with, has been a subject of debates I’ve since had with friends and colleagues. Then she’s onstage with The New Yorker ’s Adam Gopnik for a pitch-perfect marvel of a talk, from the rumble of chummy laughter from the audience at Gopnik’s not-quite-jokes to the reveal that Lydia’s soon-to-be-published memoirs are titled Tár on Tár . She demurs when her own milestones are brought up — Blanchett gleams like platinum in the stage lights — citing the women conductors who’ve come before her as the real pioneers, but also clearly disliking having her success framed in the context of struggles against sexism. Solidarity means that your triumphs are shared, and Lydia wants those triumphs to be hers alone. She’s not a maestra but a maestro, and she’s not driven to reshape the system, just to rise to its top. But not everyone shares that interest, and Field subtly scatters the seeds of his heroine’s eventual downfall.

Lydia’s assistant, Francesca ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ’s Noémie Merlant), an aspiring conductor, seems to have shrunk her life down to nothing with the expectation that she’ll eventually be handed a plum opportunity. Lydia’s wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss), is first violin at the Berlin Philharmonic, and was there before Lydia found her way to being chief conductor, though now Sharon feels like another of her support staffers. A new Russian cellist, the winsome Olga (first-timer Sophie Kauer, a real-life musician), catches Lydia’s eye and starts benefitting from her approval at the expense of the orchestra’s hierarchy. Meanwhile, Krista, a former favorite of Lydia’s from the women’s conductor development program she’s become ambivalent about, haunts the proceedings from offscreen like a forlorn ghost. The only false note this otherwise precise film sounds is at a confrontation during a class at Juilliard, where a student’s choice of a contemporary piece veers into a fight over canon. The poor kid, played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist, has to self-describe “as a BIPOC pansexual,” a phrase plucked off a Twitter bio rather than likely to be spoken, and his faltering defense in the face of Lydia’s bulldozing on behalf of Bach is the one instance of Field tipping his hand.

But Field understands Lydia, and even empathizes with her, which is what makes Tár such a richly rendered creation. Lydia seems to move entirely through spaces of raw concrete, blonde wood, and floor-to-ceiling windows, and to be whisked around in private jets or her sleek car, and the film opts for long, fluid takes that cradle the character just as luxuriously. Hers is a high-end paradise she’ll eventually be cast out of, and while it’s entirely her own fault, Field stresses how her downfall came from her willingness to have art be foremost. That’s a convenient position to hold when it’s your art, and it’s other people’s hearts, dreams, and livelihoods that get thrown into the hopper on your behalf. Lydia, holed up in her old apartment as she works on a new composition, or teasing out the interpretation she wants from a group of musicians, bending their collective sound to her will, is a genuine talent and a true believer in her work. But in Tár , where everyone bends to Lydia like reeds in the wind, you understand how someone can fool themselves into believing that being a monster is just part of the work, that it’s a requirement, that everyone else is just there to enable the work to happen. And in the film’s perfect ending, Lydia finds a way for the work to continue, somewhat. It’s a finale so arid that it takes a beat to appreciate how funny it is, too.

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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.

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: tár.

Bob Mondello

The film Tár is at once a meditation on a celebrated woman who abuses her stardom, and a star vehicle for Cate Blanchett.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Writer-director Todd Field conceived his new movie, "Tar," about a symphony conductor, with Cate Blanchett in mind. In fact, Field says, if she hadn't agreed to play the part, he would not have made the movie. Critic Bob Mondello says the filmmaker's faith in his star is well placed.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Conductor Lydia Tar is the kind of famous person who needs no introduction.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAR")

ADAM GOPNIK: (As self) If you're here, then you already know who she is.

MONDELLO: So of course she's getting one...

GOPNIK: (As self) Lydia Tar is many things.

MONDELLO: ...From Adam Gopnik, the real-life writer for The New Yorker, playing himself, who's about to interview her for an audience that's as eager to see her as she is eager to be seen. The camera is on Lydia, standing backstage as she has a thousand times in concert halls and many times in lecture halls. And though you'd think this would all be second nature, she looks as if she'd flee if she could. Until...

GOPNIK: (As self) Thank you for joining us, maestro.

CATE BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Thank you.

MONDELLO: She's on and charming, chatting about music and conducting and how what she does in setting the pace - the time for an orchestra - is central to its interpretation.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) You cannot start without me. See; I start the clock. In my left hand...

MONDELLO: Someone this concerned with control, you sense, is almost telegraphing that she's afraid of losing control. But as inhabited by Cate Blanchett, Lydia is quite ostentatiously in control.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Now, the illusion is that, like you, I'm responding to the orchestra in real time...

GOPNIK: (As self) Right, right.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) ...Making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing or reset it or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is...

MONDELLO: Lydia is performing and has the audience rapt. And afterwards, a young woman approaches, as young women apparently often do. Lydia is the first female conductor of a German symphony orchestra, which makes her a role model. And she has a child with the woman who is first violin for that orchestra, which makes her another kind of role model. As her assistant ushers Lydia away from the female admirer and Lydia lingers, writer-director Todd Field gives us our first glimpse of an artist who thinks boundaries don't apply, and that's reinforced in a different way when she publicly shreds a student conductor who's challenged the orthodoxy of dead, white, male composers at a class at Juilliard.

Her cruelty with the student and with her assistant and even with her life partner is something she does not display at talks with The New Yorker. But at orchestra rehearsals for an upcoming recording of Mahler's "Fifth Symphony," she is breathtaking.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) (Inaudible) crescendo.

MONDELLO: Blanchett, whose way with even the most ordinary line has enough tonal modulation to make her voice seem a musical instrument, learned not just to conduct an orchestra and to play piano but to speak German for this part.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Please, please, please, please, you must watch. (Speaking German).

MONDELLO: As impressive as Blanchett's performance is, it's matched by Field's script, which rewards close listening not just for its wit and precision, but for the way it conveys the dissonance that creeps into Lydia Tar's life - say, in the musical intervals that distract her - in a distant scream, a police siren, what sounds like a doorbell.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) I keep hearing something.

MONDELLO: After earning eight Oscar nominations with his first two films, "In The Bedroom" and "Little Children," Field took 16 years to devise "Tar." And considering the nuanced balance he's striking between Lydia's predatory, manipulative behavior and the aesthetic perfection of her work, it's hard to begrudge him a moment of that time. With Blanchett at the center of virtually every scene, "Tar's" portrait of an artist who attempts to conduct life and is upended by her conduct in life feels so fiery and passionate it blisters. I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC PERFORMANCE OF MAHLER'S "SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN C-SHARP MINOR - 4. ADAGIETTO. SEHR LANGSAM")

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“Tár,” Reviewed: Regressive Ideas to Match Regressive Aesthetics

By Richard Brody

The conductor James Levine was fired from the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 following accusations that he had sexually abused four men—students of his—three of them when they were teen-agers. The conductor Charles Dutoit resigned his post with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that same year after he was accused of sexual assault by several women. (Both men denied the accusations.) In Todd Field’s film “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as an orchestra conductor named Lydia Tár, both men are mentioned, by an elderly male retired conductor, as objects of his sympathy. This peripheral character’s remark should hardly be taken for the writer and director’s point of view—except that the drama is centered on accusations of improprieties levied against Lydia and presents her as a victim. The movie scoots rapidly by the accusations that she faces; it blurs the details, eliminates the narratives, merely sketches hearings, leaves crucial events offscreen, and offers a calculated measure of doubt, in order to present her accusers as unhinged and hysterical and the protesters gathered against her as frantic and goofy. Moreover, it depicts her as the victim of another attack, one that is based on blatant falsehoods, but that, in the wake of the other accusations, gains traction in the media.

“Tár” is a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics. It presents Lydia as an artist who fails to separate her private life from her professional one, who allows her sexual desires and personal relationships to influence her artistic judgment—which is, in turn, confirmed and even improved under that influence. It presents the efforts to expand the world of classical music to become more inclusive, by way of commissioning and presenting new music by a wider range of composers, as somewhere between a self-sacrificing gesture of charity and utterly pointless. It mocks the concept of the blind audition (intended to prevent gatekeeping conductors, musicians, and administrators from making decisions on the basis of appearance). It sneers at the presumption of an orchestra to self-govern (which the one that Lydia unmistakably conducts in the film, the Berlin Philharmonic, does in real life). It derisively portrays a young American conducting student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who identifies “as a BIPOC pangender person,” and who says that he can’t take Bach seriously because he was a misogynist. The film looks at any social station and way of life besides the money-padded and the pristinely luxurious as cruddy, filthy, pathetic.

Lydia’s backstory—of a sanitized, résumé-like sort—is dispensed in the movie’s first long scene, a New Yorker -centric one, featuring my colleague Adam Gopnik, as himself, interviewing Lydia onstage for The New Yorker Festival. He introduces her by way of a litany of her achievements: conducting posts with the great orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York, a background in ethnomusicology and the music of Indigenous peoples, a repertory that involves commissioning music from female composers and performing it alongside venerable classical works, even an EGOT . As Gopnik recites her bona fides, her assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who obviously compiled them, silently lip-synchs along offstage.

Lydia is married to Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), the orchestra’s concertmaster, a relationship that began around the time of Lydia’s appointment to the group’s leadership. They live, with their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), in a Brutalist apartment of a pristine monumentality (though Lydia keeps her old place, in an old building, to work in). Lydia is the co-founder of a program to mentor aspiring young female conductors. Francesca, one of her former students, works tirelessly as Lydia’s factotum, amanuensis, and personal assistant, in the expectation of becoming her assistant conductor in Berlin. Another former student, Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote), is seemingly stalking Lydia, who has meanwhile been thwarting Krista’s career by dissuading orchestra administrators from hiring her. There’s the hint that Lydia had had sexual relationships with both Francesca and Krista—but only a hint, and enough calculated vagueness to leave viewers debating in the lobby.

“Tár” is a useful reminder of the connection between regressive ideas and regressive aesthetics. It’s also a useful illustration of the fact that there is no such thing as “the story,” no preëxisting set of events that inherently define a character’s life, rise, or fall. This movie, launching the action with the barest of hints that Krista is the bringer of trouble to paradise, does almost as good a job at effacing the specifics of whatever may have gone on between them as Lydia herself does of deleting Krista’s incriminating e-mails. (One hint of the nature of their relationship is an anonymous gift—a signed copy of Vita Sackville-West’s novel “Challenge,” based on the author’s romantic relationship with a woman who attempts to die by suicide—that Lydia tears and discards.)

The movie takes the point of view of Lydia throughout. She has lived for so long in the world of private jets and private foundations that anything else seems like a dreadful comedown. It identifies so closely with her perspective that it even depicts several of her dreams—yet, despite getting inside her head, Field can’t be bothered to show what she knows of her relationships with two of the key characters in the film; he doesn’t convey what Lydia knows of her ostensible misdeeds, whether with flashbacks, internal monologues, or the details of investigations. The film seems to want it both ways: it sustains Lydia’s perspective regarding music, her professional relationships, and her daily aesthetic, while carefully cultivating ambiguity regarding what Lydia is charged with, in order to wag a finger at characters who rush to judgment on the basis of what’s shown (or, what isn’t). By eliminating the accusations, Field shows which narrative he finds significant enough to put onscreen. By filtering Lydia’s cinematic subjectivity to include disturbing dreams but not disturbing memories, he shows what aspect of her character truly interests him. By allowing her past to be defined by her résumé, he shows that he, too, is wowed by it and has little interest in seeing past it.

This movie about an artist’s life and work is, for the most part, utterly unilluminating about the music on which it’s centered. It delivers a few superficial details regarding Lydia’s effort to interpret the piece at the core of the film, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, in terms of the composer’s biography. As for new music, Lydia may commission it and conduct it, she may exhort Max to discover the feelings in it, but the movie never shows what Lydia herself does with it or finds in it. The best moments in the film are the few, of a quasi-documentary import, in which Lydia, in rehearsal with the orchestra, exhorts and directs the musicians in fine points of phrasing and other expressive details.

Yet the music itself is filmed with an absence of style. Not a single image of the orchestra at work has a visual melody or a contrapuntal density, and the filming of performance seems borrowed from any DVD of a symphony orchestra. (By contrast, see Edgar Ulmer’s filming of the real-life conductor Leopold Stokowski and the musicians of his orchestra in the 1947 film “ Carnegie Hall .”) The conducting gestures that Lydia makes, her expressions while conducting, are laughable, not because Blanchett’s performance is in any way ridiculous but because Field’s awkward, lumpish images make it appear so. In a climactic scene, in which Lydia gives vent to her largely stifled rage against her perceived persecution, she emerges from the wings of the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert hall to the sound of the opening trumpet call of Mahler’s Fifth, which Field turns into the equivalent of a baseball player’s walk-on music .

The movie is no less obtuse regarding the artistic side of the power plays and the personal relationships that go into the making of music. A young cellist, Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), whom Lydia chooses on the basis of attraction to her, in stealthy defiance of the blind audition, turns out to be a gifted musician whose particular talents Lydia pushes to the fore (with a planned performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto). Far from alienating the somewhat bewildered orchestra, Olga soon wins their admiration. Moreover, the prime beneficiary of the accusations against Lydia (significantly, relegated to the gossipy New York Post ) is a conductor of lesser talent, a boardroom-friendly art bureaucrat (and a funder of her mentorship program), Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong). The one moving aspect of the offstage lives of musicians involves the fear of exposure that queer musicians endured, the deformation of their private lives by the pressure to maintain secrecy, and Lydia’s confession about the career-threatening troubles that she and Sharon endured when they made their relationship public. Yet, at the same time, Field has the chutzpah to liken today’s #MeToo era—in which, one character claims, to be accused is to be considered guilty—to the supposed excesses and false accusations of Germany’s postwar period of de-Nazification.

The careful ambiguities of “Tár” offer a sort of plausible deniability to its relentlessly conservative button-pushing, and its aesthetic is no less regressive, conservative, and narrow. The film is constructed as a series of scenes that cut from one place to another, even jumping ahead just a few minutes or hours, and the characterization of Lydia Tár is similarly disjointed. Blanchett’s performance doesn’t suffice: she incarnates each moment sharply and emphatically but, despite her supremely skillful exertions, Field doesn’t forge dramatic unity. The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all. “Tár” digests great art, and high-flown talk about it, into a smooth and superficial package. It’s as far from the great art of movies as most movie scores are from a Mahler symphony. ♦

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Tár Is the Most-Talked-About Movie of the Year. So Why Is Everyone Talking About It All Wrong?

Critics are taking todd field’s film at face value, but the final act suggests that nothing is as it seems..

Lots of writers and critics disagree about Tár , Todd Field’s film starring Cate Blanchett as an art monster and orchestral conductor whose past catches up with her. Is the movie “ the best film to date on ‘cancel culture,’ ” or is it “ a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture ”? Is Lydia Tár clearly portrayed as an “ abuser ,” or is Field “ stacking the deck in the character’s favor ”? Is Lydia Tár a real person or a fictional character ?

There is something, though, that everyone seems to agree on, and it’s what happens to Lydia Tár. (Spoilers ahead!) The conductor’s transgressions—real, exaggerated, or invented—are discovered, and they are her downfall. She loses her position, her foundation, her fame. She never gets the chance to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, the performance that would be the capstone to her career. Cancel culture (or maybe it’s just justice) has reached out and found her, and by film’s end, she has hit bottom. Google “Tár ending” and you’ll find several pieces explaining the “ bitter joke ” of the movie’s final scene, Lydia conducting video-game music for a convention full of cosplayers in an unnamed Southeast Asian city. The game? Monster Hunter. The monster has been hunted.

However, I think all of this is wrong, or at least arguable. We may see all those things on the movie screen, but I’m not convinced that’s exactly what happens in the final third of Tár . None of these articles address what is aesthetically the most puzzling aspect of Tár . Very few writers have taken up the uncanniness of its final act, the supernatural elements Field introduces, and the hints—more than hints: the big, broad pronouncements —that a great deal of what we’re seeing on the screen might just be happening inside Lydia Tár’s head.

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The final act of Tár is, I think, so heightened and weird that it basically doesn’t make sense if you try to read it literally. But perhaps because the movie’s cultural questions are so fun to wrestle with, or because Field’s attention to sociological realism in the rest of the film is so acute, many viewers are determined to do so. But when I finally watched Tár , it was the movie’s spookiness, and the uncertainty that spookiness casts over the film, that stuck with me. I think Todd Field is doing something entirely different from what almost every writer so far has thought he was doing. Field “moves smoothly from dry backstage comedy to something like gothic horror,” A.O. Scott wrote in a typically insightful review that still takes much of Tár’s “comeuppance” and the movie’s “ragged, wandering, superfluous denouement” at face value. Let’s explore the gothic horror of Tár.

I’m certain I’m not the only one to write about this—it’s a big internet—but after a lot of searching, all I’ve found is this tweet, from New York Times writer Joe Bernstein …

… which the writer and historian Mark Harris amplified, with his own agreement:

It was all in your head! is, of course, an often disappointing story construct. Sometimes it really works , and sometimes it really doesn’t . I’m not ready to say that the final section of Tár is, as Bernstein believes, “a kind of hallucination or dream of personal disgrace, which therapy tells us is secretly pleasurable.” But I will go to the mat to say that reading the “plot” of Tár literally is a mistake. For long stretches of the film, we have exited the realm of realism and are firmly in the world of the supernatural. Tár is not truly a cancel culture movie. Tár is a kind of ghost story, in which we’re so deeply embedded in Lydia Tár’s psyche that nearly everything that appears onscreen is up for debate.

The ghost, of course, is that of Krista Taylor, Lydia’s former protégée, with whom Lydia is accused of sleeping and who, we know, was blackballed from conducting jobs through the emails Lydia hurries to delete. Even before Krista’s death by suicide, she haunts Lydia: We see her long red hair in the audience for Lydia’s conversation with Adam Gopnik.

We’re led to believe she sends Lydia a copy of Vita Sackville-West’s Challenge —a book inspired by Sackville-West’s love affair with a woman who threatened suicide after their separation —which Lydia stuffs into the trash in an airplane bathroom. And just about an hour into the movie, as Lydia returns to her pied-à-terre after lunch with her mentor, look who’s waiting for her, tucked behind the piano:

In movie time, this is just as the cellist Olga arrives in Berlin for her audition, and riiiight about when Krista dies. It’s also about the time Lydia starts hearing mysterious noises, some explicable (a medical device in a nearby apartment), some not. Who set her metronome a-ticking? Who’s that knock, knock, knocking on her door? Who’s that scream, scream, screaming in the woods?

And then comes the visit to the young cellist Olga’s grotty Berlin apartment building, where, she says, she’s staying with friends. Bernstein and Harris are right, I think, to view this as a pivotal moment in the film. Lydia, waiting in her car, finds Olga’s little stuffed animal. Behind her we see Olga walking into the entrance of the building. A silver SUV drives past, and—

In the reverse shot, no time seems to have passed, but Olga has vanished, and Lydia is already out of her car. Observed now by a gently drifting handheld camera, Lydia walks through the passageway and into a courtyard full of trash, where she hears, far away, a woman singing. We follow Lydia on her descent down the stairs, into a dripping, poorly lit underworld of unoccupied rooms. Deeper and deeper she goes, the pitter-patter of little steps echoing behind her, making her glance over her shoulder again and again. And then she turns, and—

Is that the black dog of fate? The black dog of depression? An actual, literal dog—but freaking gigantic? Where has Olga gone? What is this infernal place? Is this a dream, or a horror movie, or is it Tarkovsky’s Stalker ? Lydia flees, and face-plants at the top of the stairs.

After her partner, Sharon, cleans up her face, Lydia gets up to comfort her daughter, Petra, in the middle of the night. And if you look closely, you’ll see, motionless in the dark corner of Lydia’s bedroom, nearly unnoticeable at the back of the frame, a red-haired woman: Krista.

We are no longer watching a movie whose style is that of, as Slate’s Dana Stevens put it, “cool, keenly observed detachment.” The movie has swerved, in these scenes, into the uncanny. Are we seeing Lydia’s dreams? Her greatest fears? Is she lying unconscious in a Berlin courtyard, her face being eaten by a giant black dog? Field never entirely reveals his hand, but the movie has transformed. Or perhaps another way to say it is that we’ve seen the movie injured, made just slightly shaky where once it was immaculately composed.

Lydia, too, is injured. Not just her face. Her right shoulder burns: “ Notalgia paraesthetica ,” her doctor diagnoses, which Lydia mishears as nostalgia . But perhaps the past is still with her, in some way: The nerve disorder notalgia paraesthetica presents as a phantom itch, an “ unreachable itch ,” not unlike the memory of one’s own guilt, or a sound you can’t unhear.

It’s that right arm, Lydia tells Adam Gopnik at the film’s beginning, that marks time. “Right from the first moment, I know exactly what time it is,” she says, with supreme confidence, “and the exact moment that you and I will arrive at our destination together.” In the film’s final act, Lydia loses that right arm, loses her confident control over time, and a film that was up till now conducted at adagietto , like the slow movement of Mahler’s Fifth, picks up.

A video of a charged encounter at Juilliard goes viral, oddly edited from multiple perspectives, even though no one in that rehearsal room seemed to have a phone out. A story in the New York Post accuses her of grooming multiple young women. Moderato. Her performance score for Mahler’s Fifth disappears without explanation. She loses the support of her foundation, her access to a private jet. Allegro. We are in Lydia Tár’s point of view now, in her subjective space, and all is unraveling with shocking speed, including possibly her mind. Protesters picket her poorly attended reading in New York. Olga abandons her at her hotel for someone more fun. Sharon kicks her out and withholds their daughter. She loses her position, loses her chance at the Fifth. Vivace. And now, somehow, we are backstage at the climactic performance, and somehow Lydia is there too, standing next to the trumpeter while he fanfares. He pays her no mind, not even as she rushes the stage, tackling the hack they’ve brought in to replace her.

More than one critic has noted how unusually melodramatic this moment seems. Maybe what they mean is that it’s unbelievable . And maybe we are not quite meant to believe it.

This is, after all, what she long dreamed would be the crowning moment in her career. It is for this sublime symphony that Lydia has worked, fought, seduced, acceded, betrayed, loved. And now a future exists in which she never has that opportunity, in which Mahler’s Fifth is missing from her career just like its score is from her shelf, all thanks to a ghost from her past. What might a glimpse of that possibility do to a mind like Lydia Tár’s? At a massage parlor in that unnamed Asian city, she stands before a chamber, the “fishbowl,” in which a score of young women await selection, an overt enactment of the subtle power dynamic Lydia has been taking advantage of for years. “You just pick a number,” the receptionist tells her. Who is the woman who, in that dreamlike moment, looks up, the woman who makes eye contact with Lydia and sends her into the street, retching?

No. 5. If it all seems too neat to be real, perhaps that’s because it is.

But what does it all mean ? What really happens? Is it all a dream? I admit that I don’t know, nor do I think Todd Field wants us to “know.” Tár isn’t a puzzle box, where the answer clicks into place at the end and we understand, at last, who Keyser Söze was. Think of this film, instead, as a journey through a haunted forest, like the ones the Grimms wrote about—like the one where Lydia hears that scream. We wend our way down ever-darker paths, becoming less and less certain what is real and what is not. By presenting the reality of Tár as increasingly subjective, Field is demanding that we question everything we see on that big screen, and receive the film as a mix of plot and psychology, incident and nightmare—all coming back around to the life, the dreams, and the fears of the incomparable Lydia Tár.

“The Five is a mystery,” she tells Gopnik in that same early conversation. Gopnik asks if she has a different interpretation of that symphony’s mystery than did her mentor, Leonard Bernstein. And Lydia responds with a reference to her ethnographic fieldwork in the Amazon, making a distinction about the relationship of the past to the future that I think matters for this interpretation of the film.

“The Shipibo-Conibo,” she says, referring to the tribe she studied—a real tribe, one known for the maze-like patterns on their pottery, replicated by Krista on the book she gave Lydia—“only receive an icaro , or song, if the singer is there on the same side of the spirit that created it. In that way the past and the present converge—the flip sides of the same cosmic coin.” She contrasts that belief with Bernstein’s belief in teshuvah —atonement, but also return : “the Talmudic power,” as she puts it, “to reach back in time and transform one’s past deeds.”

When Lydia Tár’s one chance at Mahler’s Fifth comes along, she will not be there to receive that song; she is, after all, no longer on the same side as the spirit that’s been haunting her. But neither can she imagine atoning, or transforming her past deeds. Perhaps what we see, in the avalanche of calamity that concludes this remarkable movie, is all that the monster can imagine instead.

Tár (2022) - 4K UHD Review

“You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself.”

Sixteen years after the release of his acclaimed film Little Children , Todd Field has finally returned to the director’s chair. This time he presents the audience with a very surprising yet beautifully crafted piece about an acclaimed conductor’s fall from grace. Starring the always wonderful Cate Blanchett , Tár handles the ever-relevant #MeToo and quid pro quo themes with a unique subjectiveness and unforgiving lens…

Lydia Tár is a well-renowned composer who is preparing one of the most important live recordings of her career: Mahler's 5th Symphony. Around her, she has a plethora of support. There’s Francesca ( Noémie Merlant ), her assistant and aspiring conductor. There’s also her wife and concertmaster, Sharon ( Nina Hoss ). And also, Eliot ( Mark Strong ), who runs Lydia’s fellowship program and is also a conductor. But as the recording approaches, Lydia’s blunt and unsympathetic persona, as well as her pattern of intertwining her professional and personal passions, starts to haunt and destroy her career and life.

Amongst the many masterful qualities that Tár possess, one of the most interesting and genius things about this movie is this: Lydia Tár is not a good person. And this is the case from the get go. The lengthy opening scene of an interview between Lydia and Adam Gopnik (playing himself) tells us exactly who Lydia is. She’s gifted. She’s intelligent. She’s passionate. She’s head-strong. She’s self-confident. But…perhaps a bit too self-confident. Her persona – her arrogance is very apparent. You cannot help but admire her…but you also cannot help but feel unsure about her. And for good reason. All things considered; the villain of this movie is Lydia herself. She is in the wrong. She is the accused. And making a movie on this very contemporary subject matter from the point of view of the criminal – from the point of view of the person abusing their power – is just a masterful and innovative stroke of genius by Field and his writing.

But on top of that, Field makes sure Lydia a fully flushed-out character. She is not completely lacking in humanity and heart. She does care for her wife. And she especially cares for her adopted daughter, Petra, who gets bullied at school. Her love for her daughter is genuine, and you can absolutely feel it. Her selfishness and succumbing to her vices destroy her, yes. But there is a heart in there, somewhere. Despite the audience constantly disagreeing (and even hating) pretty much all of the decisions she makes, it is not without some kind of understanding. The subjectiveness gives us a unique understanding that make us unable to completely hate her. Actually, there is much room to even feel bad for her. And seeing the escalation and reasons for these mistakes makes her somehow seem more human.

Field ’s directing, as well as his tightly-knit writing, are very stark in a masterful way. The camera movements are simple. It primarily follows the characters who are talking, but it is really a film where it makes the audience forget that the camera is there. However, that doesn’t mean there was a lack of care. There is a directness and honesty in the shots, especially for the shots that linger. The tensions in the air heighten naturally as the scenes unfold without many cuts or distractions. The audience gets sucked in. And for those of you who love them, there is a “oner” that probably holds for ten or fifteen minutes that tracks Tár , and the other characters throughout the entire time they occupy a single room. It is quite an amazing feat.

Tár hits all of the right notes as it crescendos to an explosive point that send its title character to a place of no return. Despite the long respite from filmmaking, Field proves he is still a master filmmaker with a one-of-a-kind vision. The entire cast, especially Blanchett , give pitch-perfect performances guided by Field ’s beautifully composed words and vision. It is a work of art!

Tár is now playing in theaters.

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Home Video Distributor: Universal Studios Available on Blu-ray - December 20, 2022 Screen Formats: 2.39:1 Subtitles : English SDH, French, Spanish Audio: English: Dolby Atmos; English: Dolby TrueHD 7.1; French: Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 Discs: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray DiscTwo-disc set Region Encoding: 4K region-free; blu-ray locked to Region A

From director-writer-producer Todd Field comes TÁR , starring Cate Blanchett as the iconic musician, Lydia Tár. The film examines the changing nature of power, its impact and durability in our modern world.

Capturing the greyish hues of the Berlin setting and the warmer tones of the music halls, this 4K transfer captures Tár collapsing world in an immaculate fashion. Though the film doesn’t employ a vast color palate (not that is has any need for it), has been transferred expertly. The details of the musical notations, the suspicious and curious gazes, and the cold, harsh landscape of the historic city all make themselves known with this UHD HD10 release. There’s nothing to complain about with this transfer.

Included on the 4K disc is a pounding English Dolby Atmos track. Along with that are both Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks for both French and Spanish speakers.

With the explosive blares of the orchestras beautifully blasting the classical music into our ears, the Dolby Atmos track does wonders for this release. While the rest of the film capitalizes on the quieter moments, the epic arrangements of Tár ’s conductions that completely immerse you are what make this Dolby Atmos track worth it.

Supplements:

Though this 4K release does a great job with its video and audio transfer (and even a fantastic, original cover art that is not just the movie poster), there is an unfortunate absence of any supplemental features with this release. Being one of the best films of the year, I had hoped there would be something of a commentary track or interviews or SOMETHING that dives deeper into the film, but alas…I guess we must do without.

Commentary :

Special Features:

MPAA Rating: R for some language and brief nudity. Runtime: 158 mins Director : Todd Field Writer: Todd Field Cast: Cate Blanchett; Noémie Merlant; Nina Hoss Genre : Drama Tagline: A Film by Todd Field. Memorable Movie Quote: "Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media." Theatrical Distributor: Focus Features Official Site: Release Date: October 28, 2022 DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: December 20, 2022 Synopsis : Set in the international world of Western classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and first-ever female music director of a major German orchestra.

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